Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England

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Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England Megan L. Hickerson

Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England

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Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England

Megan L. Hickerson

© Megan L. Hickerson 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–3833–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–3833–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hickerson, Megan L., 1966– Making women martyrs in Tudor England/Megan L. Hickerson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3833–4 1. Christian women martyrs—England—Historiography. 2. Foxe, John, 1516–1587. Actes and monuments. 3. Protestant women—England— Historiography. I. Title. BR317.H53 2005 272’.6’082—dc22 2004059162 10 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my mother


Contents List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Ecclesia and Pornapolis: Two Churches, Two Women

18

3 The Troublesome Mrs Kyme: John Bale’s Disorderly Virgin

42

4 Gospelling Sisters and Women ‘Goinge up and Downe’: Foxe and his Detractors

73

5 Mrs Prest’s Heavenly Husband: Foxe and the True Church

103

6 Mrs Prest and the True Church: the Necessity of Disobedience

128

7 Conclusion

160

Notes

180

Bibliography

223

Index

235

vii

List of Figures 1. Frontispiece of John Bale, The First Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of god Mastres Anne Askewe … (Marburg, 1546). 2. The submission of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII, in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1583), I, 179.

viii

71

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Acknowledgements This book was possible because of research grants and other support provided by the History Department and Graduate School of Syracuse University. Over the years of this project I have enjoyed the kindness and support of a number of friends in and outside of academia, but I would like to thank in particular my doctoral supervisor at Syracuse and friend, Joseph Levine, as well as my other teachers there, Cissie Fairchilds, Kenneth Pennington, and Dennis Romano. Special thanks also go to my teachers at Texas Tech University, James Brink and John Howe, who introduced me (respectively) to women’s history and martyrology. I have benefited enormously from contact and discussion with my colleagues at King’s College, London, and with members of the wider community of scholars drawn together by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, the British Academy-funded John Foxe Project based at Sheffield University, and the British Library, including Jeff Anderson, Tom Betteridge, Kim Coles, Tim Elston, Elizabeth Evenden, Tom Freeman, Laura Gowing and Carole Levin. For other kinds of support over the last months and years, huge thanks go to my dear friends, Rebekah Ambrose, Bethany Barratt, Karen Bruner, Phil and Tanuja Dehne, Jill Fehleison, Valerie Griffith, Holly Hurlburt, Gareth and Kristy Kitchen, Darin and Julie Leighton, Randy and Diane Nation, Eric and Kenly Ames-Reed, and Nicola White. Most of all, none of what made this book would have been possible without the love and support of my mother, Nancy Parrott Hickerson, to whom it is dedicated.

ix


1 Introduction

In 1527, Henry VIII (1509–47) began the process of repudiating his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry her lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. His movement between these two women – and also between their children by him – accompanied a rejection of papal authority in England, an authority which had allowed by dispensation Henry’s marriage to Catherine, his elder brother’s widow, in 1502, but which was now refusing him the divorce he so wanted. In response, Henry and his principal ministers pushed through Parliament a series of statutes eroding papal power in England and enshrining Henry’s supreme headship over the Church of England.1 The 1534 Act of Royal Supremacy was accompanied by the delegitimization of Mary, Henry’s daughter by Catherine, in favour of the children of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, by the Act of Succession of the same year.2 Effectively named a bastard, Mary was sent away from court in 1531, at the age of 15. Her father refused to see her until after his first two wives had died and he had married his third, Jane Seymour, in 1536. Mary never saw her mother again. Despite his break with Rome and his excommunication, Henry never became Lutheran or reformed himself, but clung tenaciously to Catholic doctrine regarding clerical marriage, the sacrament of the Mass, confession, the veneration of saints and prayers for the dead. Doctrinal Protestantism of any form remained heresy in England, and by the 1540s a series of laws ensured that adherence to its major principles was punishable by death. The Act of Six Articles (1539), the King’s Book (1543) and the Act for the Advancement of True Religion (1543) all mark victories for Catholic – if anti-papal – orthodoxy in England, but following Henry’s death in 1547, and with the succession to the throne of Edward, his minor son by Jane Seymour, England became 1

2 Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England

Protestant by statute. Having been recalled to court life by her father during his third marriage, Mary now returned to isolated retirement, refusing to accept the reforms pushed through by the Lords Protector – first Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (the king’s uncle), and then John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. At Edward’s death in July 1553, and perhaps with his cooperation, Dudley led an attempt to place Henry VII’s granddaughter, Lady Jane Grey (whom he had contrived to marry to his son, Guildford), on the throne. Within days of her brother’s death, however, Mary entered London and took possession of her throne, executing Dudley and, subsequently, both Guildford and the 16-year-old Jane. When Mary came to the throne she was 37 years old, unmarried and a devout Roman Catholic. It is reasonable to suppose that she identified reformed religion with her own and her mother’s suffering (Catherine had died a broken woman in 1536 at the age of 51), the immediate cause of which was her father’s break with Rome and marriage to Anne Boleyn, a known patron of reform. Whether for reasons of personal hatred, sincere faith or (most likely) a combination of the two, as queen Mary was determined to destroy the reforms and surviving reformers of her father’s and brother’s reigns and restore England to the true faith, Catholic and papal. To her short-lived delight it appeared that she was to be assisted in this goal by the ‘most Catholic’ of European princes, Phillip II of Spain, whom she married in July 1554 and by whom she hoped to bear an heir. When she died of cancer in November 1558, however, Mary was childless, her kingdom weakened by both religious division and what had turned out to be a disastrous alliance with Spain. England was at war with France, had lost the last of its continental possessions and within three years (beginning in 1555) had seen the slaughter of over 300 Protestants, burned as heretics. These mass executions, Mary’s chief legacy in the popular imagination – then and now – were a serious political miscalculation which most of her English and Spanish advisers realized soon after they had begun.3 When Mary died, England was far from securely Catholic and the queen’s apparent failures and misjudgements had given ample rhetorical ammunition to those Protestants who survived her reign. 4 She was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth, who had been kept in prison or under house arrest during most of Mary’s reign, and who, as Anne Boleyn’s daughter and Mary’s prisoner, had been a potent (if unwilling) symbol of Protestant opposition. Elizabeth’s Protestant subjects greeted her succession with enthusiasm both at home and abroad, where it had

Introduction 3

been eagerly anticipated by the communities of Protestant exiles who had fled England for the continent in their hundreds between 1553 and 1558.5 John Foxe, until then a minor if respected Protestant polemicist, was one of these exiles. During his stay on the continent, he published the first, embryonic versions of the project that would dominate the rest of his life, bringing him fame if not fortune: an historical record of the true church persecuted, the most complete and influential of all Protestant martyrologies, the Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church. Foxe was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1517, at the dawn of European Reformation. His father had died when he was a child, and his mother’s second husband, Richard Melton, appears to have provided for Foxe’s early education. At the age of 16, with help from friends, Foxe entered Brasenose College, Oxford, one of the colleges open to commoners, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in July 1537. From Brasenose he moved to Magdalen College with a probationary fellowship in 1538 and was elected a full fellow in July 1539. 6 He remained in his fellowship at Magdalen, where he received his Master of Arts degree, for another six years. Although appointed a lecturer in logic, he focused primarily on the study of divinity. He formed friendships with a number of reformers at Oxford, and it is thought to have been during his years at Magdalen that he converted to Protestantism.7 Foxe left Magdalen College and Oxford during the summer of 1545, a victim, it seems, of his own unorthodoxy. While it is stated in the college records that he resigned his fellowship voluntarily and with honourable cause,8 he seems to have been put under pressure to do so because of his reformist attitudes, which had been made punishable by death following the passage of the Act of Six Articles in 1539. After leaving Magdalen, Foxe moved to Charlecote, in Warwickshire, as tutor in the household of the Protestant William Lucy, and it was there that he met his wife, Agnes Randall. He seems to have been content in Charlecote, but soon, believing himself a hunted Protestant, he decided that he and his wife had to leave the Lucy household.9 Shortly after Henry VIII’s death in 1547, the Foxes moved to London, where, following a brief period of poverty, Foxe obtained a position in the household of Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond (the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk and widow of the king’s illegitimate son), as tutor to the children of her recently executed brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Foxe remained attached to the duchess’s household throughout Edward’s reign, during which time he established a long and intimate


relationship with Thomas Howard, the future Duke of Norfolk, befriended the Protestant polemicist John Bale, was ordained deacon (in 1550) by Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and began his publishing career.10 This comfortable position ended, however, when Edward died in 1553. The new queen released from the Tower of London the Duke of Norfolk, grandfather of Foxe’s pupils, who immediately dismissed Foxe, sending his eldest grandson, Thomas, to serve as a page in the household of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, also recently released from imprisonment. 11 Thomas Howard managed to convince Foxe during the first months of Mary’s reign that he could protect him, but according to Foxe’s son Simeon, in a memoir of his father’s life, after encountering Gardiner by chance during one of his visits to the young nobleman, Foxe decided to flee. Howard agreed and financed the journey, convinced by this close call and Gardiner’s veiled threat – when Howard claimed that Foxe was his physician, Gardiner responded, ‘I like his countenance and aspect very well, and when occasion shall be, will make use of him’ – that Foxe would be safer abroad.12 Shortly after the reinstatement by Mary’s second parliament of the Act of Six Articles in April 1554, Foxe and his wife left Newport for the continent. After stops in Antwerp, Rotterdam (where they visited Erasmus’s birthplace) and Frankfort, they settled for a time in Strasbourg, where they joined a substantial community of English exiles.13 While in Strasbourg, Foxe brought out a version of the later, as yet unplanned, Acts and Monuments, the Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554).14 After this first continental printing, he and his wife returned to Frankfort where the English exiles had an independent church, but following the expulsion from the city of the Scottish reformer John Knox, Foxe and his family moved to Basle. There he became a proof-reader for the printer Joannes Oporinus, and it is from Basle, and the Oporinus press, that he published the remainder of his exile works, culminating in what is generally considered the first version of the Acts and Monuments, the 1559 Latin Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum.15 As Foxe’s biographer John Mozley laments, little is known of Foxe’s life for most of the period of his exile. He wrote and published the play Christus Triumphans, produced a commonplace book and published an open letter to the nobility of England, Ad Inclytos ac Praepotentes Angliae Proceres Supplicatio, which begs them to use their influence to stop the religious persecution. He translated Thomas Cranmer’s second treatise on the Eucharist (which was never published), corresponded with other

Introduction 5

reformers and worked on the Rerum. Above all, he awaited the death of Mary Tudor, which came on 17 November 1558. By January 1559, he had produced a tract of congratulation from Germany to England, Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio, which celebrates the recovery of England and thanks those on the continent who supported the English exiles. This tract is accompanied by Ad Christum Anglorum Exulantium Eucharisticon, a prayer of thanks to Christ for ending the harsh exile of English reformers, again paying tribute to their continental friends. Despite his written celebrations of exile’s end, Foxe himself remained on the continent longer than most of the English Protestants, staying to see his Rerum through the press, and also, according to Simeon, to be assured of stability in England as he now had two infant daughters. The Foxes arrived in England in October 1559, and were immediately taken in by Thomas Howard, now Duke of Norfolk, whose London home remained their base in the city until they bought their own house in 1570. Foxe was ordained as a priest in January 1560 by his friend and collaborator on the Acts and Monuments, the newly appointed Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal. Despite apparently enjoying popularity as a preacher and evangelist, he accepted only two modest prebends during Elizabeth’s reign, perhaps because of his aversion to the retention in the Church of England of what he considered remnants of popery, particularly clerical vestments: he was given one prebend at Shipton in 1563 (which he kept until his death) due to the success of the first edition of the Acts and Monuments, and one at Durham in 1572 which he kept for only one year. Foxe moved his family to Norwich in 1560 at the invitation of John Parkhurst, the city’s bishop, where his family remained while he was in London labouring over the English Acts and Monuments. When the first English edition of the Acts and Monuments emerged from John Daye’s London press in March 1563, it captured the imagination of the English reformed community, who saw it as an expression of the ‘national faith second in authority only to the Bible’.16 Following its initial publication, Foxe was inundated with information about the Marian martyrs from their survivors, and he immediately began planning a second edition of the work, which came out in 1570 (subsequent, if less altered editions came out in 1576 and 1583). In 1571, Privy Council and Convocation ordered that every cathedral church in England purchase a copy of the Acts and Monuments to set alongside the English Bible, and that it should be made available in the houses of senior and cathedral clergy: many parish clergy also purchased the book, as according to archepiscopal instruction.17 The Acts


and Monuments was thus a national institution, joining the English Bible ‘as a prop of the Anglican establishment’18 and becoming one of the most widely disseminated and influential texts of the sixteenth century and beyond, surpassed in importance only by the Tyndale Bible as a formative text of English Reformation.19 By the 1580s, it was appearing as a fixture in plays and polemical works, providing ‘cultural authority’ to groups with ‘radically different views of the legitimacy of the English Church’, which suggests the ubiquity only a canonical text can achieve.20 The Acts and Monuments was more, however, than a popular, canonical or even ‘officially sanctioned’ text. As both Steven Mullaney and Mark Breitenberg argue, it was a project participant in the production of the English Reformation, as opposed just to being a product of it.21 Crucial to its centrality as a critical text in the ‘forging’ of the English Protestant ‘community’ is its presentation of a large number of ‘prototypes’ for it: it creates, through its presentation of the martyrs as well as the variety of documents linked to them – letters, articles, interrogations – an extensive ‘dialogue’ among those inside the community and against those outside.22 This dialogue relies largely on repetition, with Protestant exemplars resembling and repeating each other in action, confession, strategy, ritual and manner of death: amassing an ‘entire Protestant “state” of texts … the Acts and Monuments fills its pages and the minds of its audience with Protestant copia’. While nevertheless a ‘history’ of the church, it is, importantly, as Mullaney argues, anticipative rather than retrospective, ‘less a mass of documentary evidence than a series of sites for the apprehension, affective investment, and reconfiguration of the ideological and political subjects who read it’.23 If the post-Reformation English were, as Patrick Collinson argues, a ‘people of the book’, the Acts and Monuments was their formative text.24 The examinations of male and female martyrs within it both constructed and reflected the values and self-identity of its readership, a readership which included women. Educators and authors of conduct books considered it appropriate instructive and edifying reading for women and girls during the sixteenth century and after, and recommended it in a number of publications, including Thomas Salter’s A Mirrhor Mete for all Mothers, Matrones and Maidens Intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie (1579), Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses (1583), Thomas White’s Little Book for Little Children (1674) and Benjamin Keach’s Instructions for Children (1693). The Acts and Monuments is known to have been in the libraries of Lady Mary Grey, Lady Margaret Hoby, Lady Mary Rich, Katherine Brettergh and Elizabeth Wallington (the

Introduction 7

wife of a seventeenth-century Puritan artisan), and is mentioned in the correspondence of both Brilliana Harley and the seventeenth-century Quaker Elizabeth Walker, who named it among the ‘prudent’ choice of books of instruction and devotion which she recommended to her daughters. Of the 358 Tudor martyrs described by Foxe, 48 are women, thus apparently providing post-Reformation English women as well as men with ‘prototypes’. That Foxe meant for these martyrs, female members of the elect, to serve as models for virtuous, godly behaviour is a near inescapable conclusion.25 But is it a correct one? The English Protestant discourse of which Foxe was principal architect is associated in modern historiography with female subordination, an extreme model of domestic patriarchy and an obsessive concern, driven by a fear of female sexuality and its consequences, with keeping women firmly under male control. The female martyrs described in the Acts and Monuments, however, are often disobedient, opinionated, articulate, aggressive and/or immodest. Their behaviour is sometimes scandalous: they might abandon their husbands and children or form seemingly inappropriate extramarital, if not necessarily sexual, relationships. While Foxe, as Thomas Freeman has shown, judiciously edited correspondence between male martyrs and their female friends to deflect the accusation that Protestantism taught women disobedience or inappropriate assertiveness, he seems to have adopted no such strategy when it comes to describing his female martyrs, their lives, behaviour and personal experiences. 26 This did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries. Catholic polemicists eagerly and predictably discredited his women martyrs by accusing them of immodesty and even promiscuity, using ammunition provided by Foxe himself in their stories. While some modern scholars have noted his tendency to portray women martyrs as ‘pert’ or even combative, drawing attention to his authorial conformity, in their cases, to a traditional hagiographical ‘strength-in-weakness’ paradigm, they have tended not to acknowledge the implications of his portrayal of their marital disobedience, instead focusing on what they see as his ‘promotion of a new Protestant ethic of marriage’. 27 As Eric Carlson has noted, Foxe was one of the first English Protestants to celebrate marriage as holier than virginity.28 For him, as for Christian thinkers since the time of Christ, earthly marriage was modelled on Christ’s relationship with his church, a relationship in which there is no question of equality between partners: wives were expected to obey and, most importantly, to abnegate themselves wholly if necessary out of fidelity and loyalty to their husbands. A few of Foxe’s


women martyrs approach expected type when it comes to enacting their social roles, but in beginning and completing their journeys towards martyrdom they all – especially the married women among them – demonstrate an extramarital or broader familial fidelity compromising their potential to serve as models for ideal female behaviour. This was recognized by their contemporaries, and Miles Huggarde, for example, a Marian Catholic polemicist, explicitly condemned female martyrdom for its social implications. As I discuss in Chapter 4 below, women martyrs were disorderly in a way that male martyrs could never be and Foxe realized this too, but did not attempt to filter their experiences, both described and embellished in the Acts and Monuments, through a lens of polite behaviour. Gender ideology can be discerned, however, elsewhere than in descriptions, portrayals or even the real experiences of individual women: it exists in expressions of value, in discourse about anxiety and in opposing signifiers. 29 Foxe does not impose his ethic of marriage on his women martyrs as women in the world, a world which, as martyrs, they are by necessity, at least under his pen, in the process of rejecting. He does, however, promote an ethic of patriarchal marriage in the Acts and Monuments, in his conception of the true and false churches, their natures, their membership and their behaviours. Foxe conceives of the two churches – one of Christ, the other of Antichrist – as inversions of each other: one, a chaste wife, mild and selfabnegating, the other, a lusting whore, hungry for sex and power.30 These opposing gendered figurae, while embedded in a traditional discourse using an anthropomorphic metaphor to express the nature of God and his church, grew as extreme signifiers linked specifically and explicitly to the sexual behaviour of the two churches, out of Protestantism persecuted, in the work of Foxe’s friend and collaborator on the Acts and Monuments project, John Bale. Bale’s Image of Both Churches (1541–7), an exegesis of the New Testament Book of Revelation, provided a frame for an English Protestant discourse opposing itself to the (now papal) Antichrist, whose body is tangibly female – the body of a whore, dangerous and yet familiar. The construction of such limited and dichotomous categories of women – Christ’s mother, for example, whose very virginity is brought into question, is specifically displaced by his bride – within an anti-papal discourse driven by hatred and fear, both reflected and helped to enable the more immediate redrawing of categories of women discerned by many modern historians at the level of community, in England and elsewhere in sixteenth-century Europe. The question here is not whether the straightening of categories of women in post-Reformation

Introduction 9

discourse found practical application or enforcement at the level of community, although a certain amount of historiography suggests that it did.31 I am interested in the way gendered imagery was used in martyrology – a formative early modern discourse – both to express fear of persecution and to define emerging English Protestant identity. As Merry Wiesner has argued in relation to her study of Martin Luther’s use of ‘the female and the feminine [my emphasis]’, language is ‘both a reification of power relationships in any society, and a way of exerting power over others’. Luther, she argues, chose his words, images and illusions to evoke a certain response, so that as important as what he said when talking about women was how he said it.32 Like Luther, Bale and then Foxe described individual women and used feminine imagery to express concepts: of good and evil, true and false, elect and reprobate, spiritual and carnal. Frances Dolan has recently argued that the seventeenth century in England saw a rhetorical linkage between broad anti-popery, fears about indigenous Catholic recusancy and fear of usurping, disorderly, female power, one less possible in Catholicism than in Protestantism due to the enduring symbolic power of the Virgin Mary in the former.33 Her study is one of many to locate developing early modern religious identities in anxieties about sexuality – female and thus also male. While Dolan’s main focus is fear of aggressive foreign and domestic Catholicism, much historiography takes as its point of departure the interaction between confessional attitudes towards marriage and/or the life-choice of sexual abstinence and fears of the dangerous ‘other’. I find the conflation of Catholicism and female sexual disorder firmly embedded in English texts forming nascent English Protestant identity 60 years before the Gunpowder Plot, at a time when clerical celibacy was becoming, in the English Protestant imagination, not only lamentable in its violation, but an absolute evil in itself and a gendered symbol of the dangers posed by persecuting Catholicism. As Lyndal Roper has noted, male anxieties tied to both the rejection of clerical celibacy and the institutionalization of Reformation wreaked havoc on gender identity for both men and women. Historians, she argues, in their concern for women have been blinded to the problem faced by male reformers, who were transformed from ‘models of chastity into exemplars of matrimonial harmony’. This had an enormous impact on the meaning of manhood, and thus on womanhood: Like other sanctified relations of authority and submission, marriage was conceived in bilateral terms: the governance of the husband was


counterposed to the subordination of the wife, who ought to ‘obey him as her head’. This paradigm of the relations between the sexes so saturated Reformation thinking that the discourse of wifehood began to displace that of womanhood altogether.34 Reform so affected a re-categorization of women that the ‘exemplar of evil womanhood’ became the prostitute. But this disorderly figure had a male counterpart, the Catholic cleric, who was seen as a sexual competitor of husbands, ‘variously accused of many of the sins of excessive manhood … a secret whorer and a creature of lust who may even debauch young boys’. The doctrinal battle between Protestants and Catholics set two kinds of man – the husband and the cleric – against one another, just as it opposed the virtuous wife to the ‘lusting nun’, now a whore, even if a virgin. The clergy are even painted as whores of the devil: ‘monks and priests were thus women of the most lustful kind’. 35 The mastery of a woman in marriage was central to the formation of Protestant male identity: the guarantor of sexual status in a world in which a single man, or a disobeyed one, ‘might come to seem not securely male’.36 In Augsburg, this contributed to a ‘re-inscription’ of women in the family and an accompanying classification of all disorderly womanhood as whoredom.37 It also led, in England and elsewhere, to confessional identification of the ‘other’ as a whore, giving the idea of dangerous womanhood, any womanhood that is not wifehood, political as well as social meaning:38 the seductive whore could lead men not just to sin, but into alliance with the devil himself. While a number of social historians, particularly those studying women’s relationships with crime and the courts, have profitably turned their attention to the ways in which post-Reformation English women both negotiated and found power within the patriarchal structures framing their lives,39 there seems little doubt that the period of the Reformation(s) saw a rhetorical and practical strengthening of patriarchy. If, as Collinson argues, ‘the only original feature of the Luther household was that the husband and father was a preacher … perhaps the only respect in which the official, magisterial Reformation may be said to have made a social revolution’, that in itself, as Roper has shown, had serious implications.40 It remains unclear to what extent an entrenchment of patriarchy during the period interacted with a causal ‘crisis’ in gender relations beginning in the early sixteenth century, a reaction to anxieties arising out of the convergence of economic upheaval, challenges to traditional authority and religious dissent and division.41 But the experience of religious persecution itself certainly

Introduction 11

found articulation in an early and formative reformed English discourse using heavily gendered imagery to revile, accuse and, importantly, selfidentify: discourse associated with the development of post-Reformation English identity. The discourse of anti-popery – a fundamental tenet of later Elizabethan and Stuart Calvinism – was framed around the identification of the papacy with Antichrist, which had an undoubted impact on the development of post-Reformation English identity.42 But this very identification was linked to, and often dependent on, the association of Catholicism with the institution of clerical celibacy, a man-made tradition identified in English Protestant rhetoric with the emergence in the papacy of Antichrist, or the ‘man of sin’.43 The English Protestant discourse devoted to identifying the papacy as Antichrist often conflated the notion of the institution of clerical celibacy serving as a mark of Antichrist with the problem of its violation – namely, the whoredom of Rome. But beginning in Henry VIII’s later reign in the work of the exiled reformer John Bale, a tendency developed to spotlight not just the whoredom of Catholic Rome, but its planned whoredom. Rome’s celibacy becomes, in Bale’s work, its whorish painted face, a veil of hypocrisy designed to give the impression of modesty where there is only lust, female lust. Ostentatious in the extreme, visible to all and yet hiding her true appearance with falsifying cosmetics or a veil – the veil itself pretended clerical celibacy – the false church stands in stark opposition to the true, also imagined as a woman, but in her case a chaste bride, eschewing luxury, rejecting the things of the world and visible in her faithful simplicity only to her husband, Christ. It was not just monks and priests who represented women of the ‘most lustful kind’, the Catholic Church itself took on the personality of the Whore of Babylon: not the whore familiar in some pre-Reformation heretical polemics – a symbol representing the broad papal overthrow of the lex Christi – but a whore specifically representing the hypocritical institution of clerical celibacy, an inversion of both true chastity, necessarily realized in marriage, and of the only possibility for virtuous womanhood: chaste, but sexual, marriage. The two female churches, given vivid form and personality in Bale’s Image of Both Churches (1541–7), engage in an historic cosmic battle which will be resolved according to the prophecies of Revelation: with the return of Christ, the defeat of Antichrist and the Final Judgement. Foxe adopted Bale’s eschatology and, like him, saw the increase, beginning with John Wycliffe and Lollardy in the fourteenth century, in challenges to papal authority, and the parallel and related increase in instances of religious martyrdom, as evidence


of the approach of the Last Days. While martyrdom had been on the rise, culminating in the Marian persecution, persecution itself was a mark of the true church, and its recent upsurge proved modern Protestantism’s ancestry in the primitive church, persecuted under the Caesars. This is the importance of martyrology for Foxe. While on the most basic level it serves to show up the cruelty of his confessional enemies, more profoundly it ties his church to the early church, against a Roman institution whose deviation from Christ he also plots, and proves its identity as the true church, a body necessarily persecuted by earthly authority, whose wisdom and strength, like Christ’s, are not of this world. While working on his three-volume Image, Bale also produced, from exile, two English Protestant martyrologies, the first of a male Lollard and knight, Sir John Oldcastle, and the second of a Henrician gentlewoman, Anne Askew. Foxe drew on Bale’s models for his own history, and while, like Bale and earlier martyrologists, he drew his martyrs as exemplars of imitatio Christi, he, again like Bale, abandoned the preReformation tendency to present women among them as particular models of female virtue. Rather, while imitating Christ in their selfabnegating deaths, Foxe’s women martyrs take on the characteristics of the true church, conceived of as the bride of Christ with all that that entails. While rejecting the social markers of identity and gender guaranteed by earthly marriage and specific types of gendered behaviour – in the process deviating from the norms of virtuous behaviour expected by modern historians – they conform to the ethics of patriarchy, but with regard to their heavenly rather than earthly marriages. Indeed, their obedience to Christ and complete self-effacement on his behalf are proved in part by their willingness to sacrifice earthly marriage, family and reputation as part of the process of losing their lives. And yet, as brides of Christ playing the part of his faithful wife, the women martyrs remain subversive – subversive of patriarchal order. The Acts and Monuments, far from reflecting concern over a shaky patriarchal system in this respect, sanctions the danger to it posed by the women whose disobedience in marriage, and towards royal authority, undermines its very foundations. If anti-patriarchal disobedience constituted a legitimate response to Mary Tudor’s demand that her subjects commit idolatry, it continued to even after her death: Foxe had no confidence following the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion that such royal demands had come to an end, and opposed its retention of ‘romish’ remnants. Disobedient to their husbands, and thus inversions of a virtuous ‘type’ of Protestant wifehood, the disorderly female

Introduction 13

martyrs, like Natalie Davis’s ‘women on top’, serve as models of justifiable resistance to earthly, patriarchal, anti-Christian authority.44 I do not read the Acts and Monuments as its author hoped it would be read, as a history of the church, nor do I rely on it as a source of historical biography – Foxe’s or any of his subjects’. It has been necessary, however, to adopt some working assumptions about his method, principally regarding his veracity. This is an issue with its own history. Attacks on Foxe, both contemporary and more modern, have tended to address two related questions: the worthiness of his martyrs and his truthfulness as an historian. Foxe’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries treated these issues as intertwined: to early modern Catholic polemicists his martyrs were not true martyrs, so his assertions were false. During the nineteenth century, however, specialist archivists and antiquaries began selectively nibbling away at isolated historical inaccuracies in his book, of which there are countless examples, as a way of attacking the whole work (the scale of the work makes little else possible), culminating in a full-blown assault by S. R. Maitland following the announcement and publication, during the mid-nineteenth century, of a new, multi-volume, fully collated edition of the Acts and Monuments, edited in London by Stephen Cattley. Maitland’s devastating attack on Foxe’s credibility went virtually unchallenged for close to a century, but rehabilitation began in 1940 with John Mozley’s critical biography, John Foxe and his Book. Mozley conducted a close study of Foxe’s personal papers and letters then at the British Museum and Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, and devoted several chapters to investigating some of Maitland’s charges and to considering Foxe’s broad historiographical method. He found Foxe, in particular in his treatments of the Tudor period and Lollardy, to be substantially scrupulous with his sources, and later historians, among them Charles C. Butterworth, John Fines, A. G. Dickens, and J. A. F. Thompson, have supported his conclusions. 45 More recently, scholars like Patrick Collinson and Thomas Freeman have re-posed the question about Foxe’s veracity, asking not whether he was fundamentally honest or dishonest, but rather how he accumulated and presented his material.46 Foxe seems to have been an extremely detail-driven historian, but also a selective and agenda-driven one, who used sources that suited his purpose, and sometimes misrepresented those that did not. From edition to edition he often corrected mistakes when they were brought to his attention, adding or subtracting from his accounts according to new or fuller information or his own changing agenda, and he sometimes


invented testimony or scenes in order to dramatize events, events perhaps based on fact. An instructive example of Foxe’s creativity in this respect is his dramatization in the second and later editions of the Acts and Monuments of a conservative plot against Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, who was known to have been a supporter of reform at court. The specifics of Foxe’s presentation of this critical moment in his history of Henry’s reign need not concern us here: what is important is that Foxe describes a series of events and a long dialogue between Henry and his queen, which served to dramatize her danger, Gardiner and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley’s insidiousness and Henry’s ultimate decision to foil the plot. This dramatization is surely an invention, which is acknowledged by most historians who have considered the matter, a fact that could easily provide ammunition to Foxe’s detractors. But this is too simplistic. The Catherine Parr story is set against a background which, to Foxe, was not open to question: the torture of the Henrician martyr Anne Askew – who was apparently questioned on the rack in an attempt to implicate members of the queen’s circle on charges of heresy – and intrigue against the reformist circle at Henry’s court at whose centre were Parr and Archbishop Cranmer.47 It is probably fiction, but fiction dramatizing events believed, rightly or wrongly, to be true. Foxe’s dramatization of Parr’s danger tells the modern historian little about the real details of intrigue at Henry’s court, but it can tell us quite a lot about Foxe’s attitude to Henry, his ministers and servants, and, presumably, to women and the politics of marriage. The implications of Parr’s famous, self-effacing submission to her husband and king, in which she explicitly articulates ideologies of both female inferiority and the moral and religious right of men to rule their wives and guide them spiritually, are debatable, turning on the extent to which Foxe intended his reader to see her submission as contrived and even manipulative, having first made clear her moral superiority to her husband, and certainly her higher grasp of true religion. 48 Perhaps, as Carole Levin suggests, Foxe presented Parr as a model for female behaviour, but if so the question remains to what extent his purpose was to show women how they should behave, as opposed to how they must, in order to survive in dangerous times. 49 Parr is one of the few sixteenth-century women who did leave written (and in her case published) documents of selfexpression, something that few of her female contemporaries did; this is certainly the case for women, unlike Parr, executed for heresy during the period. With the probable exception of Anne Askew – and her

Introduction 15

authorship of her Examinations is also open to question – unlike many of their male counterparts, they did not record their memories of their examinations as they awaited execution, and transcripts of their trials are not extant, if they were taken at all. Of the female Tudor martyrs, the examinations of only three, Askew, Alice Dryver and the elderly Prest’s wife, are described by Foxe in any length, as is Elizabeth Young’s, a would-be martyr who survived Mary’s reign. Of these four sets of examinations, only one – Askew’s – derives from a traceable source, even in this case printed rather than manuscript. These women were, however, burned, and this fact underlies Foxe’s dramatization of some of their stories by the production for them of long and detailed dialogic examinations. I treat these examinations in the same spirit as I do the dialogue between Henry and Catherine Parr, as presented by Foxe in order to illuminate an undisputable fact, in their cases that they were burned for ‘true religion’. Foxe may well have spoken to witnesses of some of his Marian women’s examinations, as he claims in the case of Prest. He might, as he says of Young and Dryver, have been given transcripts. Even so, I have accepted as fact that he moulded and sometimes created dialogue, and that he had to do so, if women were to number among the confessors in his work. I am thus able to consider his accounts of their examinations as presentations of them as he wished to see them. Askew is a different case, and yet he moulded her story too. 50 Ultimately, however, the style of his martyr stories all owe something to the first English Protestant martyrologist, with whom I begin this study. Like Foxe, John Bale was a great historian and preserver of sources, and the story of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is to an extent a story of his interaction with his older friend’s manuscript collection and printed works. Bale (1495–1563), a former Carmelite friar, converted to Protestantism during the early to mid-1530s, during which period he met and married his wife, Dorothy.51 He left the Carmelite order in 1536, and spent time working as a researcher for the antiquarian John Leyland. Despite suffering a brief imprisonment for his preaching in 1537, he seems to have enjoyed the protection of Thomas Cromwell, but in 1540, following Cromwell’s death, he fled to the Low Countries. During this first of his two religious exiles (the second was during Mary’s reign) he produced several works of Protestant propaganda, including the Image of Both Churches and his two martyrologies. Upon the accession of Edward VI, Bale returned to England where he joined the household of the Duchess of Richmond. Foxe was already resident at the Duchess’s home in Reigate. Foxe and Bale’s friendship lasted beyond Edward’s reign into their mutual Marian exile


in Switzerland, during which again they shared a home with their families in Basle, and which resulted in collaboration during the early years of the Acts and Monuments project.52 During his career as a friar and when working for Leyland, Bale had accumulated a number of medieval documents, including the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, a collection of sources dealing with English Lollardy which had been collected by his religious order. Foxe relied for his work on this and on a number of Bale’s publications, most importantly, the Scriptorum illustrium maioris Britanniae … Catalogus (1557–9), the main source for his papal history. 53 It is also to Bale that Foxe owed both the conception of church history and the model of Protestant martyrdom that informs the Acts and Monuments. The second and third chapters of this book thus consider Bale’s development of models that would so influence Foxe’s enterprise: the two female churches – true and false – and the disorderly female martyr, made pure by her rejection of idolatry. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Foxe’s portrayal of female martyrdom in this context, while Chapter 6 suggests some implications of his idealization of female disobedience. The conclusion briefly traces the development of Foxe’s women martyrs in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments during the century following his death. The Acts and Monuments is a critical text in the development of postReformation English culture. Its influence cannot be overestimated, and yet in its size, its changing scope and structure, and its multi-genre nature, it is difficult to come to terms with as a whole work. To date, both book- and article-length studies of the Acts and Monuments have tended to treat aspects of the work, as does this one. This study is about Foxe’s portrayal of female martyrs as persecuted members of the true church, and thus they, the women martyrs, and the true church herself (along with her opposite) dominate its focus. Both subjects, however, and their interaction with one another, arise out of a context in which Foxe was deeply engaged, but one which also preceded his historiographical endeavour: religious change, division, persecution and polemic. While Foxe dominates this study, therefore, I could not begin it with him, and instead turn to John Bale, the first martyrologist of English Protestantism.

Note on sources and abbreviations Because much of my study involves changes to the Acts and Monuments between its first and second editions, I have used the second, 1570 edition as my base-text. For that reason, I cite it throughout as AM.

Introduction 17

I also, however, frequently refer to the first and fourth editions of the work, and these take the abbreviation AM (1563) and AM (1583). See the bibliography for full titles. When citing from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, I have retained original spellings. However, for the sake of simplicity I have inserted the letters m or n when indicated in the original text by a horizontal dash, and I have substituted ‘the’ for the abbreviation y when appropriate.

2 Ecclesia and Pornapolis: Two Churches, Two Women

When Foxe began the Acts and Monuments project, his goal was to do more than chronicle the suffering of the true church and its martyrs. His principal purpose was to use history to prove the identity of the Roman Catholic Church as a false church, and its members and institutions as the body of Antichrist. The Acts and Monuments, therefore, while a history of the true church, is also, and more, a history of its opposite, the false church. It is, however, history unfinished: its end is yet to come. As prophesied in the Book of Revelation, it will end with Christ’s return to earth, his victory over Antichrist, his final judgement of humanity and his marital union with the New Jerusalem, the eternal heavenly city. While steeped in the apocalyptic, the Acts and Monuments is not itself an exegesis of Revelation. Rather, it is a collection of documents and narratives proving an historical interpretation of Revelation made before Foxe began his project by one of his early collaborators on it, John ‘Bilious’ Bale. In modern scholarship Bale tends to exist largely in Foxe’s shadow, but he had an enormous influence on the younger man. Ideas and models (both apocalyptic and martyrological) developed in his writing permeate the Acts and Monuments, and it is to Bale’s masterpiece of apocalyptic exegesis, The Image of both Churches (1541–7), that Foxe owes the outline of his history. While Bale was not the first Christian polemicist to interpret Revelation as an outline of church history, the Image is the first Protestant history of the church, 1 innovative in its systematic treatment of Revelation’s prophecies as a record of an historically detectable conflict between the true and false churches, with Antichrist and his forces eternally present in the false church, and thus in the world.2 This is not to say that Bale was the first reformer to see the potential usefulness of the Book of Revelation in Protestantism’s polemical war 18

Ecclesia and Pornapolis: Two Churches, Two Women 19

against the papacy. In his interpretation of the text, he draws on traditions of exegesis, both English and continental, which pose individual popes or the whole papacy as Antichrist, a false church opposing itself to Christ, his laws and his church. Martin Luther himself, while explicitly denying the canonicity of Revelation in his 1522 New Testament, by the late 1520s was recommending a hermeneutical scheme for its interpretation, both historical and prophetic, and in the preface to the text in his 1530 New Testament he offers a thumbnail sketch of the church’s history as against the text’s prophecy. 3 Luther’s change of heart seems to have been inspired by his discovery of the Opus Arduum, an anonymous fourteenth-century Latin Lollard exegesis of Revelation in which the Antichrist is identified as a corporate body inhabiting the whole papal establishment, which replaces the lex Christi with its own law, claiming both spiritual and secular authority. Luther edited and published the Opus Arduum in 1528 as Commentarius in Apocalypsin, citing it as proof that he and his followers were not the first to ‘interpret the papacy to mean the reign of Antichrist’.4 In his 1530 preface, Luther recommends a means of exploiting Revelation – to him an inferior sort of prophecy (while it could not teach Christ, it could teach Antichrist) – for the purpose of exposing the papacy as Antichrist. While himself offering a brief outline of church history as he read it in the Apocalypse, he did not take on the task of fleshing out this history; rather, he threw down a gauntlet picked up by Bale. While surely inspired in part by Luther’s challenge, Bale was, however, more dependent on other sources for the substance of his historicization of Revelation, and he took the general outline of his history, according to which the seven seals of the Apocalypse mark seven ages in the history of the church, not from Luther, but from Expositio in Apocalypsim, the exegesis of a twelfth-century Italian abbot, Joachim da Fiore. 5 While several hundred years old when Bale came to it, this work was not published until 1527. It seems to have escaped Luther’s notice, but it heavily influenced the work of the first Protestant exegete of Revelation, François Lambert, whose Exegeseos … in sanctam Divi Joannis apocalypsim is the most cited of Bale’s sources in the Image, and his probable conduit to Joachim.6 As is the case in Luther’s treatment of Revelation, the sine qua non of Bale’s project is his identification of the whole papal church as the false church and as such Antichrist, an identification both contextualized by and dependent on the exegetical discourse of two realms first identified as opposing entities or cities by the fourth-century Donatist writer Tyconius. Tyconius conceived of the New Jerusalem, the triumphant


city of Revelation 21, as the church, and Babylon, the city of disorder, not as a second, false church, but as the world in opposition to the only church:7 Antichrist is an ‘omnipresent evil’ in the world, whose members are difficult to distinguish from true Christians.8 Augustine of Hippo, the spiritual ancestor most frequently claimed by sixteenthcentury reformers, adopted Tyconius’s dualist theme in his massive De Civitas Dei (413–26), like Tyconius rejecting the idea of an individual Antichrist, instead distinguishing between the true church and a malignant amorphous body of enemies to Christ. Augustine read the Apocalypse as a description of the conflict between Christ and Antichrist, whose opposition parallels those of Jerusalem and Babylon, the civitas Dei and the civitas diaboli: the whole company of the elect is the mystical body of Christ (the woman clothed with the sun in Revelation 12), and the reprobate the body of Satan, the Beast and the Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17).9 Augustine did not, however, adopt a terminology of two churches, and in fact such a construction did not emerge in Christian rhetoric until the fourteenth century, when John Wycliffe began referring, for example, to ‘“two maner of chirche, holy Chirche or Chirche of God … and the cherche of the fend”’.10 The discourse of two churches, according to which the devil’s church was the papacy, became commonplace among both Lollards and Hussites and was widespread by the early sixteenth century, when it was picked up by Luther and the wider reform movement. Joachim had, however, placed the Antichrist in Rome two centuries before Wycliffe, if not in the papacy itself,11 and as the Lollards and Hussites were conceiving of the whole Roman church as the false church and body of Antichrist, Joachim’s followers were naming individual popes as individual Antichrists. In Joachim’s exegesis, which unlike Wycliffe’s did not itself adopt a two-church framework, the legitimate pope plays a positive role as pastor angelicus, a preacher who converts the pagans before the advent of Antichrist. 12 Followers of Joachim developed the idea of a counterpart for the pastor angelicus, now the head of the church of Christ, an anti- or pseudo-pope presiding over the carnal city of Babylon. John of Olivi (1248–98) referred to this pseudo-pope as Antichristus misticus (with the Emperor Frederick II as the Antichristus magnus) and his followers (along with the Fraticelli) openly identified individual popes as the mystical Antichrist.13 Thus, as Irena Backus puts it, ‘slowly, the idea of the Roman Antichrist took shape and was ready for use by the reformers’.14 While both believed that they were living in the Last Days, neither Augustine nor Tyconius drew comparisons between ‘external’ history


and the inner history of the heavenly church:15 according to the tradition of apocalyptic exegesis arising out of their work, the final book of the New Testament was a moral treatise and a revelation of the nature of the church, but not history or even prophecy. Until Joachim’s exegesis identified it as a revelation of God’s plan for all of human history, past and future, the Apocalypse was seldom read as historical or prophetic. Along with placing the pope in Rome, therefore, one way in which Joachim’s thought was of great importance to sixteenthcentury reformers was in its suggestion that the final, seventh age of church history would see a mass apotheosis for the faithful. Thus, while Tyconius and Augustine both avoided the more chiliastic or millenarian tendencies of Revelation, for example by suggesting that the millennium (the thousand-year bondage of Satan prophesied in Revelation 20) was the whole age of the church’s history,16 Joachim posed the millennium as the seventh age, a thousand-year period following the second coming of Christ – a spiritual age, under his rule, in the world. While Bale departs from Joachim’s timing of the millennium, placing it between the death of Christ and around AD 1000 (when Antichrist’s domination of the papacy begins), he maintains the idea of a seventh (short) age as a period of peace on earth. English writers following Bale, including Foxe, drop the seventh age on earth altogether, reading the sixth age as the final one in human history, after which the elect would enter the New Jerusalem achieving eternal union with Christ, and the reprobate would begin their eternal sentence of damnation. Nevertheless, unlike what would emerge in the next century, Bale’s apocalyptic focuses on persecution and the past, rather than the future, even a future of glorious salvation: its major themes are the doctrine of the two churches; the identification of the papacy as Antichrist; and the imminence of a painful end heralded by persecution and martyrdom. 17 Bale saw his own age as the sixth, like Lambert seeing the Reformation as an eschatological event clearly predicted in the Apocalypse.18 While Bale was undoubtedly influenced by English and continental medieval apocalyptic tradition, he was also writing within the context of an early sixteenth-century discourse already setting itself against the papacy as Antichrist, often drawing on history as a tool for doing so. This identification, not just of the papal church as the false church, but of the papal establishment itself as a corporate body of Antichrist, marks a departure from the image of Antichrist most prevalent during the Middle Ages, of Antichrist as an individual – perhaps even an individual pope – an image most reflected in and inspired by the Libellus de


Antichristo of the French Abbot, Adso of Montier-en-Der (b. 910), a vita of sorts of a future, single, human Antichrist.19 Following Adso, Antichrist as a human demon became the subject of plays, poems and religious (including heretical) polemic for the next half-millennium. Luther’s Antichrist, on the other hand, like Bale’s, harkens back to the Augustinian collective image of the reprobate forming the body of the Beast, while, unlike Augustine, identifying him as the papacy rather than an undetectable body hidden among all humanity. In constructing Antichrist as a collective body rather than a single figure, and then placing him squarely in the papacy, Luther was followed by English commentators such as William Tyndale, Robert Barnes and John Frith. They, however, did not, in adopting Luther’s identification, develop his suggested historical approach to Revelation, but based their arguments on Rome’s moral depravity and contrariety to Christ. An oft-quoted passage by Tyndale, from The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1527), is typical of early English reformist Antichrist rhetoric: Antichrist is not an outward thyng, that is to say, a man that should sodenly appeare with wonders, as our fathers talked of hym. No verily, for Antichrist is a spirituall thyng. And is as much to say as agaynst Christ, that is, one that preacheth false doctrine contrarie to Christ. Antichrist, to Tyndale, is a spiritual force eternally present in the world, even pre-dating the Incarnation: having ‘fought with the Prophetes’ in the Old Testament, ‘he was also in the time of Christ, & of the Apostles’. He ‘is now & shall (I doubt not) endure till the worldes ende’, and he can be judged by his contrariety to Christ, for example, for wishing to ‘divide you from Christe and his holy Testament, and ioyne you to the Pope, to beleve in his Testament and promises’.20 Tyndale uses biblical and moral evidence to identify the Antichrist in his time as the papacy and its adherents. While specifying the marks of Antichrist – significantly including Bale’s bugbear, the institution of clerical celibacy – he neither conceives of his presence as evidence of a progress towards apocalypse, nor does he express an interest in prophetic chronology.21 For Frith, one of Tyndale’s disciples, Antichrist is also known by his moral failings – the manner in which he contradicts Christ’s teachings – but, also like Tyndale, Frith stops short of placing the identification of Antichrist or the historical crimes of the


papacy in an eschatological context.22 Tracking the historical emergence of Antichrist in the papacy and exploring the implications of this for understanding prophecy was left to Bale; in effect, he created a coherent framework of the ‘nebulous implicit historical thrust’ of apocalyptic thought,23 the first English reformer, as Margaret Aston argues, to realize that ‘the exile of the Papacy from England meant the ending of a whole historical tradition’. Convinced that medieval historians had used corrupted history to conceal the identity of Antichrist’s church, Bale conceived of an historical project, one he most fully realized during his exile during Henry VIII’s latter reign, which involved ‘taking over enemy territory, and using enemy ammunition. Official records, works compiled by the authorities to condemn and eradicate heresy, were to be used as they had never been used before; for an antiCatholic purpose.’24 The Image was part of this project, and in it Bale combined the ‘historicist’ exegetical method found in Lollard works and then proposed by Luther, and the concept of the two churches permeating medieval and now contemporary Protestant thought, adding a new emphasis on detailed historical research to ‘illuminate the pattern of church history as fulfilled prophecy’. 25 The Image, for that reason, is unique and groundbreaking, and as a paradigmatic work it sets a context for Bale’s broader historiographical project (discussed further in Chapter 3) and for Foxe’s. Bale is also significant, however, for his devotion to marking out the female qualities of the two churches, the true and the false. Conflating as the true church the pregnant woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12) with the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21), he assigns to her the characteristics associated in modern historiography of the period with the Protestant ethic of patriarchal marriage. At the same time he self-consciously genders the false church as a disorderly whore, conflating the figures of Jezebel (Rev. 2), the whore of Revelation 17 and the city of Babylon whose destruction marks the victory of Christ (Rev. 18–19). This is an aspect of his exegesis that has received little attention in modern scholarship, but it is central to his semiotics of church identity: his symbolic embodiment of the two churches as gendered corporations of the elect and the reprobate. The Image in the title of his work is a female image, opposite reflections of one creature – woman – who appears as either a faithful bride (of Christ) or an adulterate whore (to Antichrist and the kings of the world). Bale was certainly not the first to pose the relationship between Christ and his church as analogous to the bonds of earthly marriage, nor was he the first to conflate the New Jerusalem’s antithesis, the


carnal city of Babylon, with the whore described in Revelation 17. The Christian church has, since its inception, been figured as the bride of Christ, and members’ faith as an anticipation of union with the bridegroom is a metaphor frequently employed in the Gospels of the New Testament and the Pauline epistles, as well as in the Book of Revelation itself.26 Bale’s Ecclesia, however, is not like her Catholic sister, or rather, precursor. The medieval Ecclesia was heavily associated with the carnality of Christ – in his humanity – and in particular with the Sacrament of the Mass. In medieval iconography, the figure of Ecclesia seldom appears without a chalice, with which she either offers the blood of Christ to potential communicants or catches it as it falls from the wound in Christ’s side. Both symbolized by and symbolizing his blood (she is sometimes depicted catching his blood while being herself born from the wound in his side), as the church the medieval Ecclesia is Christ’s bride, but she is also his body – a body, while his, made of female flesh. Caroline Bynum has argued convincingly that a combination of cultural and theological standards caused a widespread association of Christ’s body, and thus Ecclesia, with the female: the Aristotelian association of flesh with the female; the patristic analogy according to which spirit is to flesh as male is to female; and the implications of the virgin birth – born of a virgin, Christ had no human father, and so his body could only have come from his mother. Ecclesia – both bride and body of Christ – is thus associated in medieval writing and iconography with carnality, Christ’s human as opposed to divine nature, and with the consumption of that body in the transubstantiated host. 27 In the Image, however, Ecclesia’s nature changes: far from a female image associated with Christ’s carnality, Bale’s Ecclesia serves as an opposite to or even an inversion of carnality, a carnality now residing in the doctrines and sexuality personified in and symbolized by her nemesis and opposite, the Whore of Babylon or False Ecclesia. Indeed, the medieval Ecclesia, a woman of flesh and, importantly, the sacramental blood of Christ, becomes the Whore of Babylon under Bale’s pen, a woman opposing the new Ecclesia, who is now an invisible body, still of Christ, but of spirit alone. The church’s carnality is now associated not with Christ’s bride, but with Antichrist’s – the body of the celibate clergy, as we shall see. Importantly, Bale’s Ecclesia loses her chalice of blood, but the Whore of Babylon holds hers high. 28 As will be discussed below, Foxe adopts Bale’s heavily gendered imagery in his only published play, Christus Triumphans, also adopting, in the Acts and Monuments, another of Bale’s most important leitmo-


tivs, the Whore of Babylon’s veil. This veil is the institution of clerical celibacy, Bale’s personal obsession. To Bale, as to many of his contemporaries, the enforcement in the false church of clerical celibacy was a mark of Antichrist, but he was the first reformer to trace the emergence of Antichrist in the papacy through the history of this institution.29 To all reformers, enforced clerical celibacy was sinful because it forced men of the flesh into adultery, but to Bale it did not so much force men into sin, as allow them to sin, and it existed as an institution so that they could whore rather than marry. As has been noted by Thomas Freeman, Bale did more than anyone to ‘create a powerful image of the ceremonies and rituals of carnal, popish religion as whoredom’, but he particularly revelled in describing the sexual crimes of the Roman clergy, from pope to monastic to parish priest.30 Importantly, under his pen the Whore of Babylon becomes not just the papacy, but also a female symbol of the devilish institution of clerical celibacy, and as such a didactic tool to teach the benefit, even necessity, for a Christian life, of marriage. For this is the inversion of celibacy – whether feigned or honoured, it is still whoredom – marriage, sanctified by God, and modelled on his relationship with his church. As has been noted in much recent scholarship, inversion, contrariety and opposition were common means by which medieval and early modern Europeans both expressed and understood value – value attached to things, people, concepts and, importantly, gender. 31 Witchbeliefs, for example, represented an inversion of positive values in Britain and on the continent.32 Public shaming rituals directed against unruly households often involved displays of gender inversion, while popular ballads used inversion to stress the way gender determined social roles.33 Peter Lake has noted the importance of inversion to the ‘Protestant analysis of popish anti-Christianity’, and Freeman has more recently commented on the usefulness of the conception of the papacy – or the false church – as an inversion of the true.34 As Freeman notes of Foxe, in order to produce an image of his ideal church he used papal history to write a model of the negative one. Similarly, the Whore of Babylon, to Bale, is a model of the papacy, but also of outrageous disorder, personified in a whore, an inversion of holy marriage, but also, as gendered, of virtuous womanhood. Bale’s Image came out in three stages: the first (chapters 1–9) in 1541, the second (chapters 10–17, added to the first) in 1545, and the third (chapters 18–22) which completed the work in 1547. Enormously popular and influential, it was reprinted in 1548, twice in 1550 and again in 1570.35 The Image reproduces the entirety of Revelation


passage by passage, with Bale commenting on each section of text in what he calls ‘Paraphrases’. In these, he expounds at length on the marks identifying the true and false churches, immediately setting out his gendered imagery in the preface to part I : Here is the true christen church (which is the meke spouse of the lambe without spot) in her right fashioned colours described. So is the proude church of hypocrites, the rose coloured whore, the paramoure of antichrist, & the sinful sinagoge of Sathan, in her just proportion depainted, to the merciful forewarninge of the Lordes electes … And that is the cause why I have here intyteled this boke, the ymage of both churches.36 In his paraphrase of Revelation 2, which describes God’s instructions to John the Divine (the author) to write to various congregations, Bale quickly establishes the female identity of the true church, a meek, suffering woman without a home, rejecting the world, longing for union with Christ, ‘her almightye spouse’.37 Revelation 2 also provides him with an opportunity to begin building a semiotic relationship between the false church and Jezebel, whom he conflates with the Whore (and city) of Babylon of Revelation 17 (and 18). When Jezebel makes her first appearance, John the Divine is scolding the congregation of Thiatyra on God’s behalf, because ‘thou suffrest that woman Jesabell … to teache and to deceive my syrvauntes, to make them commytte fornycacion and to eate meates offered up unto Idolles … I wyll caste her into a bedde, and them that commit fornicacion with her, into great adversyte’.38 In his paraphrase of this passage, Bale rewrites Jezebel not just as ‘that cruell woman and abhominable strompet’, but importantly as the ‘malygnaunt churche and synagoge of Sathan … and the mother of holye churche her selfe’. Bale’s Jezebel, lusting for sex and blood, will ‘swime in wanton pleasure, and bath her selfe in innocent bloude, and to assist her in the same, she shall have subject unto her the septer, swearde, auctoritie, and power of prynces, Lordes, Rulars and maiestrates, that none so hardy under payne of deathe to checke her, rebuke her, nor ones say against her’.39 John the Divine’s lascivious prophetess has become, under Bale’s pen, the papacy. Both to assist in his identification of Jezebel as both the papacy and the Whore of Babylon, and to begin illuminating the implications of this identification, Bale lists a number of texts against his paraphrase of Revelation 2, some of which at first glance seem to bear no relationship to the passage: from the New Testament, Mark 10, Matthew 5,


I Timothy 4, II Thessalonians 2 and Revelation 18; and from the Old Testament, III Kings (I Kings) 16, and IV Kings (II Kings) 9. These serve to consolidate the oneness of Jezebel, the Whore of Babylon and Antichrist, and at the same time establish clerical celibacy as the primary mark identifying Antichrist specifically, and proving his oneness with the two other figures. Bale’s first two references, Mark 10 and Matthew 5, serve to associate the crimes of Jezebel described in Revelation 2 with the rejection of marriage by drawing attention to Christ’s sanctification of it, as in both chapters Jesus affirms the indissolubility of marriage. In Mark 10 Jesus delivers the famous lines ‘what God hath cuppled / let not man separate’, going on to conflate marital separation (and remarriage) with adultery: ‘Whosoever putteth awaye his wife & maryeth another / breketh wedlock to herwarde. And yf a woman forsake her husband and be maryed to another / she committeth advoutrie.’40 In Matthew 5, Jesus reaffirms that men who abandon their wives force them to ‘to breake matrimony’, and that anyone marrying a divorced woman ‘breaketh wedlocke’.41 While Mark 10 and Matthew 5 spotlight Christ’s sanctification of marriage, I Timothy 4 associates the rejection of marriage with false religion, prophesying that in the ‘latter tymes some shall departe from the fayth / and shall geve hede unto spretes of erroure / and dyvelysshe doctrine’, giving only two examples of ‘dyvelyssh doctrine’ – the forbidding of marriage and the rejection of meat.42 Bale’s first three New Testament references achieve two purposes. First, marriage is shown to have divine sanction. As with Adam and Eve, God brought husbands and wives together, making of them one flesh (Mark 10). Christ forbids the separation of married couples, overturning the Mosaic law allowing divorce. Opposition to marriage, an error predicted for the ‘latter times’ in I Timothy 4, marks those who have departed from the faith and have had ‘their consciences marked with an hote yron’ – they have been branded with the devil’s mark. By placing these references next to the condemnation of Jezebel, explicitly identified as the false church, Bale achieves his second purpose, to identify the prohibition of marriage – a ‘devilish doctrine’ – as a mark of the false church, one of the ‘wycked lawes and blasphemouse tradycyons of oulde dotying hypocrytes’ by which Jezebel brings God’s faithful servants to ‘commytte whoredome in the spryte’. Bale now drives home the identification of Jezebel as Antichrist with his references to II Thessalonians 2 and Revelation 18. The first of these prophesies the return of Christ, warning that it will come when the ‘synfull man be opened … the sonne of perdicion which is an adversarie / & is


exalted above all that is called god / or that is worshipped: so that he shall sitt as God in temple of god / and shew him silfe as god’.43 The revelation of the ‘synfull man’ is further described in Revelation 18, in which, as Bale glosses, ‘is that execrable churche of Antichriste with the filthy wares and occupyenges paynted out here of the holy Gost, & with hyr most horrible fall in the ende’.44 In Revelation 18, an angel announces the destruction of ‘Great Babilon’, who had bragged of her inappropriate power (‘I sytt being a quene and am no wydowe’) and with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication.45 Bale directly identifies the female figure in Revelation 18 with the man who sits as God in II Thessalonians 2, conflating them both with the figure of Jezebel, turning the sinful man’s self-identification as a god into the powerful woman’s as a goddess: ‘For hyghlye she standeth in her owne conceite as yet, boastynge her selfe to be the great goddess of the earth.’46 Having established Jezebel’s oneness with Antichrist, Bale uses the Old Testament to draw attention to the crimes of the historical Jezebel, crimes of idolatry and persecution against those who refused to commit it. I Kings 16 and II Kings 9 describe, respectively, Jezebel’s marriage to Ahab, King of Israel, and her death. Jezebel was notorious for her adherence to the idolatrous cult of Baal, which she brought with her from her native land of Sidonia and imposed on the court at Jezreel (I Kings 16). The Israelites who did not worship Baal came to be persecuted due to her ruthless influence over the king (like the modern papacy’s over princes), and the prophets Elijah and Elisha swore themselves her enemy. II Kings 9 describes Jezebel’s death at the hands of Jehu, appointed by Elisha to assassinate her and destroy the house of Ahab. When Jehu arrives in Jezreel to kill Jezebel, he confronts her son (the present king) Joram, who wants peace: ‘What peace shuld there be, so long as the whordomes of thy mother Jezabel and her witchcrafts, are so great?’ In defiance of Jehu, Jezebel, having boldly ‘starched her face’, looks out the window to face him. She is thrown to her death and devoured by dogs. 47 Clearly likening the worship of Baal to popish idolatry, for Bale, the Old Testament Jezebel and his present Jezebel – the church of Rome – are the same: Joram’s mother (now Antichrist) becomes the ‘mother of holye churche her selfe’. The woman who painted her face in ancient Israel is the false ‘painted church of Christ’, who is now ‘in her just proportion depainted, to the merciful forewarninge of the Lordes electes [my emphasis]’. Setting forth ‘dyvelyshe doctryne’, she, as in Israel, forces God’s ‘faythfull servauntes … to commytte whoredome in the spyryte’.48


Jezebel paints her face in an attempt to disguise herself and her whoredom (again, the purpose of the Image is to show her ‘in her just proportion depainted’). She is revealed as the man of sin, however, by her ‘devilish doctrines’, such as the prohibition of marriage – under Bale’s pen the institution of clerical celibacy – by which, as Bale argues in another work published during his Henrician exile, the Actes of English Votaryes (1546), is ‘one face of Antichrist chefelye dysclosed … wherwith he hath of longe tyme paynted out his whore, the Rome churche, that she myght to the worlde apere a gloryouse madame’.49 By defining the institution of clerical celibacy as a ‘face’ of Antichrist, with which he ‘paints’ his whore, Bale spotlights the duplicity of the false church, by which it fools humanity into worship. In this he echoes an earlier English reformer, John Frith,50 who in the Revelation of Antichrist and Antithesis (1529) contrasts Rome as the kingdom of ‘faces’, the realm of the ‘monstruous kinge’, with the kingdom of Christ, ‘which (clene with out an outward face) consisteth in the sprete’.51 The faces of the monstrous king are ‘outward clothinge / apperance / and pompe / & to use fewe wordes with superstitions / customes & ceremonies which are shewed outwardly’. Among these, ‘superstition & hypocrisye (which is a close of godliness & a face of religion) is most acceptable’. By such ‘conterfet’ of ‘godly thinges & pretend outward tokins’, it is evident that the king of faces is Antichrist, or ‘an adversarye to Christ … for Christ is a kinge mighty in trueth / an extreme adversarye to faces … And this kinge is mighty in faces / an extreme adversary of the trueth’.52 Frith lists, as the tenth of Antichrist’s twelve faces, ‘excellent (al thowgh it be fained) kepinge of virginite & chastite of the religious / which trewly semeth in the face a godly & hevenly thinge’. His discussion of this face is brief, one of the three shortest in the work, with holy days and fasting.53 Whereas Bale insists that clerical celibacy (for him not excellent, even when kept) is the most obvious face of Antichrist – and for him the most important54 – Frith states unequivocally that the corruption of the sacraments (the Mass, baptism, etc.) are Antichrist’s ‘greatest & most abominable mischeffe[s]’.55 Also unlike Bale, although he attributes clerical lechery and the debauching of women to the vow of clerical celibacy, Frith does not argue that the (‘excellent’) vow itself is intended as a façade, or face, of such lechery. He argues for Antichrist’s multiplicity of faces, and lists them, including clerical celibacy among them, but the next step is taken by Bale. Not just one of a number of faces of Antichrist, and a cause of sexual crime, clerical celibacy is now also evil in itself, a constructed veil or façade hiding whoredom, the whoredom of both clergy and church.


Jezebel, the false church, is also the ‘great whore’ of chapter 17, the Whore of Babylon ‘that sytteth upon many waters’ as Babylon the Great, a city described in chapter 18. Babylon, ‘with whom the kynges of the earth have committed whoredome’, is upon her appearance immediately paraphrased as ‘the great whore or counterfait churche of hypocrites’. She must be Rome, argues Bale, because of Rome’s similarity to the city described in chapter 18: rightly is she called Babilon or citye of confusion … under the name of Rome here maye be understanded the universall worlde with all hir hande, ful of abhominations, & fylthynesse of hyr whoredome … Great Babylon the mother of whoredome and abhominations of the earth.56 The woman (‘for a whore at fyrst blushe semeth only a woman’) sits on a rose-coloured beast, identified by Bale as the Antichrist, also the body of the clergy and temporal leaders who uphold the Roman church. She is richly dressed in purple, scarlet, gold and jewels, and holds a golden cup full of false religion (‘abhominacions & filthinesse of her execrable whoredome’).57 This Great Babylon is the mother and cause, root, spring and fountain of ‘all spyritual fornycations and in a maner of all fleshely abomynations also done upon the earth’, as well as being the ‘wyfe of the devyll and of his beastly body (for the byshops are the husbandes of theyr romyshe church)’. She is drunk with the slaughter of saints, and her two lusts – for fornication and for blood – are linked: ‘not onely that she was thus over set with bloude drynkynge or ourtragyous murtherynge of innocentes, but also of her excedynge great abhomynations’.58 The City of Babylon the Great – whose marriage to the devil is itself likened to priestly celibacy (clerics’ lecherous marriage to the Roman church) – falls to her destruction in chapter 18, which begins the third and last published part of the Image. This book begins with another short preface, in which Bale explicitly sets Babylon and the New Jerusalem against each other, as female characters: In these v. laste Chapters are the. ii. churches (wherupon resteth the whole argument, of this boke) fully by all dew circumstaunces described, the one turned over into a moste fearful and terrible destruction, undre title of the olde whoryshe Babylon, the other obtaynynge a moste gloriouse reyse, under the name of the holy newe Hierusaleem. In the. xviii. Chapter is that execrabel churche of


Antichriste with the fylthy wares and occupyenges paynted out hereof the holy Goste, & with hyr most horrible fall in the ende … In the. xxi. Chapter is the churche of the chosen or the newe Hierusaleem prepared to hir spouse. That city commeth downe from heaven, and is of the holy Goste here. After most wonderfull circumstaunces in hyr right proportion described. Revelation 18 follows, in which an angel heralds the fall of Babylon: ‘she is fallen even great Babylon … For all the nations have dronke of the wyne and of the wrath of her whoredom … the kyngs of the earth have commytted fornycation with her.’59 While Babylon has had previous falls, such as the birth of Christ and the destruction of Jerusalem, her fall is now known by the ‘plaine manifestation of his electes’ and the overthrow of monasteries in England, Denmark and parts of Germany. Babylon is now the home of ‘al uncleane spirites’: simony, sacrilege, usury, fraud, ambition, malice, gluttony, avarice, pride, filthiness and other ‘mischiefes’. She is the ‘corrupt cage of al uncleane soules & hateful byrdes’: the adulterous cardinals, the ‘buggery byshoppes’ and ‘prostibulouse prelates’, priests and monks of Gomorrah, canons, friars and nuns – ‘and inumerable swarmes of Sodomites’. The city is, Bale rants, full of ‘stewes’ (brothels), the rents of which benefit clerics.60 Bale again links the text of Revelation 18 – ‘For she sayth in her hert, I sytte, beinge a quene, and am no wydowe’ – to II Thessalonians 2, where Antichrist is known by his exaltation above God, making the connection explicit: ‘For hyghlye she standeth in her owne conceite as yet, boastynge her selfe to be the great goddes of the earth.’ In doing so Babylon claims authority in heaven, earth and hell, ‘with the power to lose and bynde, save and dampne’,61 achieving power inappropriate for a woman, a queen – but not a widow – standing ‘in her owne conceite’. Secular powers – the ‘carnallye mynded’ kings and potentates of the world – support her claims of power; thus they have committed fornication with her and abused their own power to defend her by the slaughter of innocents.62 ‘Alas,’ writes Bale, sarcastically, ‘that greate cytye, that beautyful Babylon, that blessed holye mother the churche’ will finally be abandoned by all: ‘the veritie opened [like the sinful man], none shal remayne with the nor defende thy knowen whordome’.63 Only the ‘wycked remnaunt’, like Johan Eck (‘whiche had. iii. bastardes the same yere that he disputed at Lipsia againste the mariage of priestes’) and the Bishop of Winchester (‘the Popes paraclete in England, that is mayster of the Stewes at London and such other dyrty donghylles’), will remain to try to defend her for their own sakes, but to no avail, as she will be cast


like a millstone into the sea: ‘Thy lasciviouse armony & delectable musyque much provokyng the weake hartes of men to medle with thy abhominable whoredom by the wantonnesse of Idolatrye in that kynde, shall perishe with the for ever.’64 In Revelation 19, God judges the Whore, finally avenging the deaths of his people at her hands, and Christ arrives on a white horse to defeat the beast and those with his mark: 666. In this chapter the imminent marriage of Christ is announced and his betrothed’s preparations begin. In Bale’s paraphrase, the opposition of whore and bride is straitly drawn: ‘Now that this whore [‘that proude churche of stinkyng Sodomites’]65 is overthrowen, shal he be joyned to his undefyled churche’. 66 In Revelation 20, John sees Christ cast Satan into the bottomless pit for 1,000 years, during which time those without the mark of Antichrist reign with Christ. After the 1,000 years, Satan returns to earth to deceive whole armies of men who gather to engage in battle with the saints and the beloved city of God. God destroys the armies of Satan, casts Satan himself into fire and brimstone, and Christ uses the Book of Life to judge all men, living and dead. This resolution allows for the coming of the bride. Revelation 21 describes the new heaven, new earth and the New Jerusalem, ‘come downe from God out of heaven prepared as a bryde, garnysshed for her husbande’.67 This is the true church, also signified in Revelation 12 by the pregnant woman ‘clothed wyth the Sunne’. Importantly, this woman, drawn and visually depicted as directly antithetical to the Whore is not Mary, as ‘many hath so fantasied’, but rather ‘the true Christian churche of whom Mary is a moste notable member’.68 Her pain in childbirth mirrors the ‘patient and glad sufferaunce’ of God’s witnesses, and she is confronted by a seven-headed dragon, whose appearance exemplifies the true church’s eternally present ‘contradiction’.69 While, again, not Mary – who herself is loved by God for her faith and not virginity70 – the woman gives birth to Christ,71 which makes her a spouse to God,72 after which – like individual members of her body, the true church – she flees the dragon, hiding in the wilderness where she is fed by her husband: ‘What els doth the just people of God? But flie the contagiousness, vanity, tumult, fornication, Idolatry, and filthinesse of this world? Sekyng god in the solitarie herte, and not in outward fantasies.’73 This is the homeless, wandering and hiding woman described in Revelation 2 awaiting union with Christ, a union which will come when he returns to earth to defeat Antichrist and judge humanity.


When Christ’s church, persecuted until her spouse’s return, comes out of hiding as the New Jerusalem in chapter 21, she is adorned, in Bale’s paraphrase, ‘as a beutyfull bryde’ with ‘love, joye, and Peace, pacyentenes, Meekenes, longe sufferinge, and other glorious fruytes of the spirite’. She is clothed in ‘most fyne gold compassed with dyversytie … But every man, shal not se this her appareyl, for it wyll be rather a rayment of the hart than of the outwarde body.’74 The physical and virtuous adornment of the bride is Bale’s; the text of Revelation describes the city’s golden walls encrusted with jewels, but Bale’s golden-clad spouse of Christ – loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, meek and long-suffering – is his own invention, as is the invisibility, to most, of her beauty. His bride of Christ enjoys all the virtuous attributes of the perfect Renaissance wife, attributes not mentioned in Revelation, but rather imposed upon it by the Protestant exegete.75 Bale self-consciously conflates the virtuous and invisible bride of his paraphrase with the members of the church: ‘The bryde or congregacion of the Lorde … saieth also in her hart … Oh, come, my most delectable spouse and Lorde Jesus Christe … Accomplishe the mariage.’ 76 The congregation, as the bride, receives her graces with ‘divers & gloriouse’ fruits: again, ‘love, joye, peace, pacience, long sufferinge, gentlenesse, goodnesse, faithfulnesse, mekenes, temperaunce, and such other’. For, Bale continues, ‘into this citye (saith the texte) or congregacion, which is from within and unknowen, shall nothinge enter that is uncleane, or that after any sort defileth’.77 Much more strongly drawn by Bale than by John the Divine, the contrast in appearance and character of the bride with all her virtuous attributes and the ‘gorgiouse glitteringe whore’ over whom ‘everye fleshlye man is inordinatly wanton, fearce, & gready’ (‘gloriously garnished … with golde, silver, pearle, preciouse stone, velvetes, silkes)’ is profound, forcing an equally profound dichotomy of those who would have to themselves the former, and those who would prefer the latter.78 Bale’s Image is an inaugural reformation text of critical importance to later Protestant polemic. Not only would it serve as a source for future Protestant exegesis – including Foxe’s – but it provided a lens through which generations of Protestants would view the two churches, false and true, papal and Protestant, visible and invisible. The importance of Bale’s construction of the true church does not lie solely in its antithesis to the papal church, but in its nature as invisible, wandering, weak and persecuted, virtuous and female. Like Foxe’s martyrs (and Bale’s), the members of the true church do not live within the walls of a visible institution, Protestant, national or papal. They know themselves, and


Christ knows them, but they are identifiable to others only by their scars – their persecution, suffered because of their refusal to worship false gods (or goddesses). This model of the true church, written against the background of incomplete Henrician Reformation and of Henrician persecution, while challenged during the years of Protestant Edwardian Erastianism, would become entrenched during the Marian persecution to find firm expression in the Acts and Monuments. Foxe is unabashed about Bale’s influence on the Acts and Monuments, making his dependence on the Image explicit. Like his friend, Foxe sets his work against the prophecy of Revelation and intends it to prove the identities of both his church as the true church and the papacy as the false. He makes his debt to Bale clear in his first preface to the second edition of his work, in which (also like Bale) he sets himself the task of challenging the chronicles of the past, written by historians whom he considers corrupted by their support of Rome: Whiche history therefore I have here taken in hand, that as other storywriters heretofore have employed their travaile to magnifie the Church of Rome: so in this history might appeare to all Christen readers the Image of both Churches, as well of the one as of the other: especially of the poore oppressed and persecuted Churche of Christ. Which persecuted Church though it hath bene of long season trodden under foote by enemies, neglected in the world, nor regarded in histories, & almost scarce visible or knowne to worldly eyes, yet hath it bene the true Church onely of God … Now forsomuch as the true Church of God goeth not lightly alone, but is accompanied with some other Church or Chappell of the devill to deface and maligne the same, necessary it is therefore the difference betwene them to be sene, and the descent of the right Church to be described from the apostles tyme.79 Reminding his readers of Bale’s work, he marks this passage with a shoulder-note, ‘Image of both Churches’, and the title of the preface containing this passage highlights the apocalyptic prophecy of the marital union of Christ with his true church, the New Jerusalem: ‘To the true and Faithfull Congregation of Christes universall Church, with all and singular the members thereof … wishing to the same aboundance of all peace and tranquility, with the speedy coming of Christ the Spouse, to make an ende of all mortal myserye.’ As has been well established elsewhere, the Acts and Monuments both corroborates and builds on Bale’s conception of the two churches, one


also informing the theological and political thought of several of the two men’s fellow Marian exiles.80 The semiotic influence on Foxe of the Image, however, is most explicit in his only published play, Christus Triumphans, published in 1556 during the early years of Foxe’s great project of writing the history of the church. In this Latin apocalyptic comedy, the two churches – true and false – are dramatically anthropomorphized in terms directly reminiscent of Bale’s dichotomous female image: the true church, Ecclesia, is figured as a virtuous widow, expectantly awaiting a new marriage to Christ, against an equally telling personification of the false church, the Whore of Babylon, Pornapolis.81 Christus Triumphans focuses on the persecution of Ecclesia throughout history as she awaits her marriage to Christ, which will mark both the end of human history and the deliverance of Christ’s poor persecuted elect from the torments inflicted by Satan, Antichrist and the Whore.82 The figures of Ecclesia, the heroine of the play, and her opposite church, Pornapolis, are vividly drawn, as Foxe suggests they will be in his prologue: ‘We will first give this fashion of Ecclesia, and the tumultuous rages of Satan. The Antichrist will be portrayed with Babylon, his harlot, and their tumults.’ Having identified Ecclesia as the heroine of the play, Foxe nevertheless opens it with an appearance by another woman, Eve, lamenting the death of her daughter, Psyche (Soul), who has been stolen by Satan, of which tragedy she is the mother and partner (mali quae mater fuerim, & particeps).83 Eve is approached by Mary, also in tears, to whom she explains that both her children have been imprisoned, Psyche by Satan and Soma (her son, also Soul) by Nemocrates, the Mosaic Law (I, ii). Soma’s wife, Ecclesia, has therefore been left alone with their three young children, Asia, Europus and Africus. Having heard of Eve’s troubles, Mary reveals the cause of her own tears: the murder of her son, Jesus. A storm begins and the two women, seeing the approach of Satan, recently fallen from heaven, run for cover. Soon Christ appears with Psyche (I, iv), whom he has released from Hell. Watched by an angry devil, Psyche acknowledges Christ as her saviour, and he identifies himself as the son of God and gives her a book, which he instructs her to beat Satan with, and the Mosaic law to nail upon a cross. Satan’s thousand-year bondage in Hell begins, and Christ sends Psyche to spread the good news. With the resurrection of Christ, the temptress responsible for the imprisonment of man’s soul (Eve) and the virgin mother instrumental in its release (Mary) have been rendered insignificant. Like Bale before him, Foxe brings Mary onto his stage, establishes her


difference from Ecclesia and then removes her from his drama. Human history is now structured around the destiny of Christ’s bride, Ecclesia, and her journey towards the consummation of her marriage. Raphael appears (II, i) to offer a summary of future events, particularly Ecclesia’s prophesied suffering: during Satan’s bondage, Pornapolis (the city of whores, identified in the cast-list as Meretrix Babylon) will torment her in his stead (mutuata Daemonis / Tyrannide, late instabit, vicariam / Vicem administrans illius quam fortiter), aided by Dioctes (persecutor, from diocetes, government official), who can hurt only bodies, not souls. When she makes her entrance (III, i), Ecclesia, like Eve and Mary in Act I, is in lamentation over the loss of her children, Europus, Asia and Africus, who have been carried off to Hell: ‘Now without all friends and acquaintances, and in the world, I am the ruin of the earth, brought down. Only so far, in that the spouse stays for me. Christ, always the staff (support) of our family.’84 The action of Christus Triumphans from this point revolves around Ecclesia’s struggle to consummate her marriage to Christ in the face of ongoing persecution. She is set upon first by Nemocrates (III, ii), who, however, finds that his law is overturned by Christ’s resurrection. With the law of Moses destroyed, it is left to Pornapolis and Dioctes (human law) to persecute (the bodies of) Christians. The ten persecutions of the early church under the Caesars passes, and Dioctes plans the persecution of Christians by monarchs, but is banished by the rule of Constantine (IV, ii): ‘Factus is now become a friend to Christ, and our worst enemy.’85 Ecclesia withstands these early persecutions by keeping in mind the division of kingdoms (IV, iii): ‘I bear these more lightly, which smite the body, which although they prick, the prick is yet temporary. Those [other gifts or punishments] endure forever.’86 She fears, however, the pending release of Satan from the pit and the imminent appearance of the Antichrist (bellua … Apocolyptica). The next scene (IV, iv) witnesses the reappearance of Satan with his assistant, Anabasius. Satan introduces Pseudamnus, the Antichrist, for whom the bishopric of Rome is purchased, and announces the new pope’s partnership with Pornapolis, who will help him defeat the growing following of Christ: ‘We will shave the head of this Sampson using a whore.’87 Satan’s plan is to tempt Christians with wealth and luxury: ‘No bait of pleasure will be passed over. Whatever in the world is lofty, in lechery or any enticement, I will inspire them with, as those who lace venom with sweetener.’88 Satan instructs Pseudamnus as to


the construction of his false church, focusing on its use of a counterfeit Ecclesia: In short, it is fit to reproduce him [Christ] on every part. You will make laws scripted in martyrs’ blood. Then you won’t go without Ecclesia, your false Ecclesia, just as he has his spouse. But she will be dressed in exquisite clothes, and directly leap into the regal din, and you will give the drinking cup of fornication to her, with which she will inebriate kings with toxic whoredom, and all delights …. Indeed pleasure unteaches men virtue.89 Pseudamnus is told to create the false church as it is described in Revelation, as a whore holding a cup of fornication. As the Whore of Revelation fornicates with kings, so the church of Antichrist will involve itself in ‘all things public and private … By this pact you will easily return supplicant princes to their knees. Then see that they beg from you confirmation.’ 90 Satan sends Dioctes and Nemocrates with Pseudamnus to Babylon, and instructs Anabasius to purchase jewels, crowns, fine clothes in scarlet and purple, and gold and silk robes, with which to adorn ‘Pornapolis the Babylonian Whore’ (Pornam polias, meretriculam / Babyloniam illam). 91 When Ecclesia reappears (IV, v) she is accompanied by her two sons, Africus and Europus (Asia is under siege by the Turks). They are introduced to Pseudamnus (IV, vii), the pope, who fools them into fealty by awarding them titles: Europus becomes ‘Fidei Defensor’ and Africus ‘Christianissimus’.92 Having sent his new royal stooges away, Pseudamnus summons his Whore, and Pornapolis appears (IV, viii). She delights in her public display and the wonder of the people who treat her ‘like as a god’ (ceu ad deum), reminiscent of the warning in II Thessalonians 2. Her boast is a clear echo of Revelation 17 (IV, viii): They called me Ecclesia of omnipotent God, spouse of the lamb, support of truth … Soon three kings came to meet me. They drank the cup of fornication. When the wine was warm … when we were alone, they took possession, what with my beauty, and their generation – the sword of love was unrestrained for both … They asked concede us the riches of one night … They begged, they prayed, they entreated, they sighed … I began to refuse at first, as we whores are want to do, when we want lovers who surround us to be more loving … Finally, they left us. Pledges undertaken,


I ordered them to return the next day. To you that day I will give as I said, Pseudamnus.93 Despite her confidence, Pornapolis worries about exposure by the true Ecclesia, who appears, in vivid contrast to the luxuriously clad whore, in rags, but without shame. Ecclesia is accused of being a schismatic, a lunatic, a Lollard, an Anabaptist, but she insists sum Ecclesia orthodoxa. When Pornapolis claims to be Christ’s spouse, the true Ecclesia responds: ‘The election of God stands firm having this sign: that he knows who are his’, which Pornapolis and Pseudamnus do not understand. 94 This, Ecclesia’s challenge, marks the advent of modern Reformation, and Europus’s growing realization – under the guidance of Hierologus (concionator)95 – that the church of Pornapolis and Pseudamnus is false, sparks off a new persecution (V, I), symbolized by the imprisonment of Hierologus the preacher (Hugh Latimer) in Bocardo (a prison in Oxford), where he is joined by Theosebes (Nicholas Ridley).96 Pornapolis (V, iii) laments the increasing availability of the Scriptures, and is furious at having heard sermons identifying her as a whore. Anabasius warns her and Pseudamnus that their rule is coming to an end: ‘Finally it is firmly believed you to be the Antichrist, and this Pornapolis to be the Babylonian Whore, more clear than day.’97 Pornapolis begins her decline: she swoons and is led off stage. Ecclesia returns to be reunited with Europus and Africus, to whom she explains her battered and scarred condition (V, iv): ‘But nothing shames me, which I suffer for the cause of my Spouse Christ.’98 Africus threatens a war of revenge against Pseudamnus, but Ecclesia forbids it, suggesting another plan: There is no weapon more powerful than one prayer. This machine bursts a way through Heaven itself. Of them it is to set fire, ours to bear injustice. This indeed is the lot and Victory of saints. Unless Christ is come, this beast by no means will be extinguished … What I bear, is to be borne willingly because I bear them for the cause of Christ. They are his stigmata. He will judge how he will vindicate his cause.99 Ecclesia endures her poverty and hardship for the sake of her bridegroom, as the embodiment of the church’s martyrs. When she has finished this monologue, a chorus of virgins lychnophorae appears (V, v), whom Ecclesia recognizes as her bridesmaids (comitissae). The chorus


asks her about her scars and she answers: ‘These stigmata, if you don’t know, are my jewels and only pearls, which I carry around for his cause.’100 Ecclesia prays for her bridegroom’s arrival and her wedding raiment is lowered from Heaven. The chorus sings its preparation: ‘Now the spouse nears the doors. The thrones, see, are placed and books opened, next clothes come down which the bride will adorn herself in for the wedding.’101 Africus reads from one of the books, the Book of Revelation, chapter 21: ‘I saw the New Jerusalem, descending from heaven, prepared by God as a bride adorned for her husband.’102 The chorus dresses Ecclesia in her wedding garment. When she is clothed in splendour, they ask the once battered and ragged bride: ‘Wife, do you please yourself in this new clothing?’ Ecclesia answers, concluding the play’s dialogue, ‘I am pleased finally, now that I am pleasing to my husband.’103 The company sing the Epithalamium, calling on Christ to come to his marriage, and the chorus of virgins close the play with their song. All that remains is the arrival of the bridegroom for which all should prepare: ‘Perhaps the time is not so long … Satan fights with Christ with complete forces, all over the world today, and as much as before. The lamb will prevail and although it be allowed that her body be broken first by the Antichrist, the bride of the lamb also will prevail, finally triumphing.’ 104 Foxe’s Ecclesia is the battered, homeless and finally victorious church, anthropomorphized and figured as Christ’s bride, a female, human New Jerusalem. Like Bale’s New Jerusalem, she not only serves as an embodiment of true religion, she exhibits the qualities of an ideal, self-abnegating and obedient wife. Her suffering for her husband’s sake is borne without complaint, and when it ends her satisfaction is conditional on his. Her qualities are most evident, however, in their contrast to her opposite, Pornapolis, the Whore of Babylon. As an embodiment of evil, Pornapolis is a vivid female character, the realization of all things feared in woman. Her lasciviousness is a symptom of her quest for power; indeed, it is her method of attaining it, of ruling over men. Through seduction Pornapolis brings the kings of the earth to submission, submission not merely to a woman, but to Antichrist. The previously dominant female figures in Christian mythology, Eve, the unhappy sinner, whose punishment is painfully to bear children in wedlock, and Mary the virgin mother, blessed in her chastity among women, are dealt with and discarded in the first act of the drama, never to reappear. These figures, the one an ambiguous model of womanhood, the other an unattainable if previously empowering one, are replaced by a new dichotomy of real female types: the


virtuous self-sacrificing wife and mother, who constantly bears adversity in loyalty to her husband, exhibiting meekness and obedience all the while; and the power-hungry whore, delighting in her ostentation and her sexual desirability and promiscuity, most dangerous in seeming, at first glance, chaste (‘a whore at first blush seemeth only a woman’). Pornapolis, existing firmly outside male control, even dominating her ‘husband’, Pseudamnus, tempts men not just to sin, for which they could previously seek forgiveness, but through this to worship of the beast, the devil himself. The story of Ecclesia’s cosmic battle with the Antichrist and future fulfilment of Revelation’s promise permeates the Acts and Monuments. Grounded as it is in the apocalyptic, the Acts and Monuments’ primary purpose is not the celebration of martyrs for their own sake, but rather the ‘depainting’ of the false church of Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon described in Revelation. The martyrs are evidence in this purpose, as the false church is a persecuting church, and the true church ever persecuted. Like Bale, however, Foxe sees cruelty as only one of the unsavoury and identifying marks of the false church. Babylon’s lust for blood is accompanied by a lust for sex, and her power is achieved through her wantonness, as portrayed so vividly in Christus Triumphans. The true church, a virtuous bride, exists only in its contrariety to and persecution by the false, this luxurious whore. Human and church history are now framed around a war between women, inversions of one another, whose very contrariety bespeaks a rejection of images of womanhood other than theirs: wifehood and its inversion, whoredom. The Image, written by Bale and echoed by Foxe, thus draws in its semiotics of the two churches a straight dichotomy of women: the good wife, virtuous and long-suffering in fidelity to her husband, and the whore, dangerous, attention-seeking, outside any form of male control. Pornapolis, Ecclesia’s opposite, is a monstrous figure: disguised as the bride of Christ, and thus doubly dangerous, this disordered, predatory, lustful woman is absolutely identified with Catholicism and its veiled sexuality, a sexuality that destroys marriage, and thus order, and thus society. Her opposite, on the other hand, the orderly Protestant wife Ecclesia, represents virtue, chastity, fidelity – fidelity not only to Christ, but importantly, to Christ as her husband. Such imagery provides a context for Foxe’s history, and as we shall see he continues to spotlight in his great work the contrast between the lechery of the false church and its members, and the fidelity – and importantly, marital fidelity – of its opposite, the true church and spouse of Christ. Like Bale, Foxe traces the emergence of Antichrist in


the church through the imposition of celibacy on its clergy and he marks critical moments in the church’s history through reference to the institution, one contrary to Christ’s sanctification of marriage, as a veil for whoredom. As I will explore in the rest of this book, the contrast between the lechery of Rome and the fidelity of Ecclesia is also central to his construction of martyrdom, including and in particular female martyrdom. In conceiving of the Roman church – Antichrist – as an adulterous whore, Foxe, like Bale, at the same time drew a picture of martyrdom according to which the rejection of idolatry, and thus necessarily earthly authority, constituted marital fidelity, the fidelity of Ecclesia, Christ’s perfect bride.

3 The Troublesome Mrs Kyme: John Bale’s Disorderly Virgin

When Foxe, in his Marian exile, began accumulating the materials for what would become the Acts and Monuments, he was confronted with the spectacle of Anne Askew, the first English, Protestant, female martyr, eulogized in print a decade earlier by his friend and colleague John Bale.1 In July 1546, at the age of 25, Askew was executed for denying the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar, one of the last victims of Henry VIII’s ‘whip with six strings’, the Act of Six Articles. She was a Lincolnshire gentlewoman, the daughter of Sir William Askew, and was married, apparently against her will, to Sir Thomas Kyme, who had previously been betrothed to her deceased older sister, Martha. Askew and Kyme had two children, but the couple became estranged due to her conversion to the evangelical faith, exemplified by her open reading of the English Bible at Lincoln Minster, which was illegal for her as a woman according to the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion. 2 After fruitlessly petitioning for a divorce in the ecclesiastical court in Lincoln, Askew travelled to London, where her sister Jane and brother Edward served at court. There she continued her unsuccessful pursuit of a divorce, this time in the Court of Chancery. Askew joined an energetic evangelical network in London, which included such leading reformers as the rector of St Mary Aldermary, Edward Crome; the former Bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Shaxton; the former Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer (Shaxton and Latimer had both resigned their sees in protest against the 1539 Act of Six Articles); David Whitehead; and John Lascelles, a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber.3 She was arrested on suspicion of heresy in March 1545, but released on bail without indictment after a preliminary hearing before a quest (Grand Jury) and a series of interrogations by the Lord Mayor 42

The Troublesome Mrs Kyme 43

of London and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. In June 1546, Askew was again arrested and questioned before the King’s Privy Council at Greenwich, who condemned her under the Act of the Six Articles for denying the real presence in the Sacrament of the Altar.4 She was tortured in the Tower of London during this second imprisonment, apparently at the hands of two members of Henry’s Privy Council, the Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich, the Solicitor-General. Askew’s irregular and illegal torture on the rack, occurring after her condemnation, was and is now supposed to have been an attempt to gain information to implicate, as supporters of evangelical reform, female members of Catherine Parr’s circle, with whom she was apparently acquainted.5 Askew was burned at Smithfield in London on 16 July, along with three male Protestants, including Lascelles. Shaxton, with whom she had been arraigned in June, preached his sermon of recantation at her execution.6 According to Bale, Askew’s account of her interrogations, condemnation and torture, as well as statements of her faith and some of her correspondence, were smuggled out of the Tower of London and delivered into his hands on the continent, from where he quickly published them, accompanied by his own lengthy ‘Elucydacyons’. Following the appearance of The First and Lattre Examinacyons in 1546 and 1547 respectively, the popularity of her story soon led to a demand for more editions. The two Examinations subsequently appeared bound together in three further editions, once with Bale’s commentary, in 1547, and twice without it, in 1548 and 1550. Foxe reproduced the Examinations (translated into Latin and without Bale’s commentary) in his 1559 Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum. Another English edition of the two texts, again omitting Bale’s elucidation, was produced early in Elizabeth’s reign (1560), and they appear again, shaped by Foxe’s editing, in the several editions of the English Acts and Monuments. 7 Askew’s authorship of the texts attributed to her by Bale is uncertain. No signed manuscripts of the Examinations remain, and they were certainly shaped by Bale in his transmission of them. Bale’s claim – that he was in possession of her signed manuscripts – can be neither proved nor disproved, and it is probable that her manuscripts, if they existed, were never read by anyone but him.8 It is unlikely, therefore, that shaped as they were by their editors, the published Examinations reveal awkward secrets about Askew – ideas or choices revealed only in them towards which Bale or Foxe were hostile. This latter point, however, has become a matter of concern in recent years: in his editing of the Examinations, Bale has been read as exhibiting a misogynistic discomfort with Askew,


and treatment of the texts themselves, whether due to the fact of her sex or for the more problematic fact of her separation from her husband, or both. This study accepts the problem of Askew’s authorship as given and treats the texts attributed to her, like his own elucidation, as under Bale’s control. Bale’s publication of the Askew Examinations was part of his larger project of proving the identity of the true church and her opposite, the false. True martyrs, he argues, prove by their deaths their membership of the true church, while their persecution proves both the identity and the growing power of the false, and thus also the approach of the Last Days: as he poses it in the Image, he saw the increasing incidence of religious martyrdom as a key indicator of the imminence of approaching apocalypse. Along with providing Foxe with the outline of his church history, therefore, and the framework of antithetical churches, he also, during his Henrician exile and against the background of the developing Image, wrote into character the first English Protestant martyrs: Anne Askew and a fourteenth-century Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle.9 Bale’s brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldecastell the lorde Cobham, published in 1544, is his first work exclusively devoted to martyrology. It is possible to observe his development of Oldcastle as a model Protestant martyr, as is not the case with Askew, as his two sources for the male martyr’s trials and death remain extant: an account written by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury (who condemned Oldcastle) – Processus magnus Domini Thomae Cantuariensis contra Johannem Oldcastel, militem, Dominum de Cobham10 – and a pamphlet published by William Tyndale in 1530, which Bale claims was originally penned by a friend of Oldcastle’s at the time of his examinations.11 Along with fleshing out Oldcastle’s story as it came to him, as John Knott observes, by adding theatricality, facial expressions and dramatic gestures,12 Bale’s departures from his sources serve to enhance his Oldcastle’s ‘modern Protestantism’, in particular his privileging of scripture over worldly authority (and accompanying anticlericalism), his dramatically increased testimony and the heightened frustration, in the face of his confession, of his examiners.13 Bale also provides Oldcastle, as Tyndale does not, with both a dramatic scene of death and an argument for his Protestant sanctification. His examinations and accompanying documents are sandwiched between a preface and a conclusion, and, as he will do for Askew, Bale compares him to ancient Christian martyrs, beginning with Christ himself and


including Saints Stephen, Peter, Andrew, Polycarp, the Machabees and others, at the same time contrasting him to such false martyrs as Thomas a Becket and Thomas More: ‘Whan the Gospell laye dead,’ he writes, ‘gloryous Thomas Becket was a saynct / & Johan Oldecastell a forgotten heretyque. But now that the lyght therof shyneth / we are lyke to se yt farre otherwyse’14 Within the context of ‘godlye and valeaunt warryours’, who have given their lives for ‘the veryte of Jesus Christ agaynst the malygnaunt mustre of that execrabel Antichrist of Rome the devyls owne vycar’, Oldcastle qualifies as a ‘verye specyall membre and a vessell of Gods elecyon’.15 Oldcastle (c. 1378–1417) is an interesting subject for Bale’s celebration. A convicted traitor who led an unsuccessful rebellion against Henry V, he could be seen as a dangerous choice of ‘martyr’ for the Protestant polemicist.16 He served Bale’s purpose, however, for a number of reasons, beyond as evidence, in his persecution as a ‘lamb among wolves’, for the imminence of the Last Days. Within his conception of church history, Bale viewed his own age, the sixth, the final age of human history, as commencing with the work of John Wycliffe (1324–84). Wycliffe, Lollardy and Oldcastle are all appropriated for the cause of sixteenth-century Protestant history,17 but Bale is also interested, as part of his historical project, in establishing a history of Christian purity in England, a purity struggling against the impositions of a foreign power, the papal Roman church. This struggle for uncorrupted religion manifests itself, in Bale’s analysis, in historical figures like the Lollards, for example, who both opposed themselves to Roman authority in England and promoted the translation of scripture into the English vernacular. Oldcastle, in this context, is seen not just as a martyr for Christ, but one for England as well: a valiant figure famous for his military service to Henry IV, he is presented, in Bale’s invention, pledging allegiance to Henry V and asking to be judged under his authority, by wise men rather than, as it appears in Tyndale, clerics who by definition derive their authority from Rome.18 Oldcastle in this respect constitutes Bale’s first step in producing, as he calls for in his preface of the account, ‘the Englyshe chronicles in theyr right shape’, written by ‘some lerned Englyshe manne’, unpolluted, unlike Polydore Vergil’s English chronicles (Anglicae historicae libri XXVI), with ‘Romyshe lyes and other Italyshe beggerye’.19 Bale took his next steps in restoring English history in 1546 and 1547, when he published his history of Rome’s corruption of the English church, Actes of the Englysh Votaryes (1546) and the two volumes of the Examinations of Anne Askew (1546–7). Subtitled comprehendynge their


unchaste practises and examples by all ages, the Actes is a history of the English church’s fall into depravity, caused and accompanied by the enforcement of celibacy among its clergy. Mocking the saints of the Roman Catholic Church, Bale attacks their credibility through a litany of their (largely sexual) abuses. Following publication of this work, the Examinations present Askew, on the other hand, as a true saint, a member of the true church, primary evidence in the historical project of proving the identity of the false. A woman defying traditional and contemporary standards of female virtue, Askew, like Oldcastle, is not at first glance an ideal Christian martyr, certainly not one consistent with models produced in preReformation hagiography. Married with children, and thus clearly not a virgin, she was by her sexual maturity alone atypical, if not singular, in the context of traditional vitae sanctarum. While such hagiography describes saints and martyrs, both male and female, living and willingly dying in imitatio Christi, Catholic women’s vitae, in addition to echoing Christ’s, also derive from the New Testament’s archetype of female perfection, Mary, whose primary identifying characteristic is her virginity. Most of the female martyrs of pre-Reformation Catholic hagiography are virgins, and those who are not, by the time of their deaths, have escaped their sexual indebtedness, rejecting their spouses if married, and thus their sexual lives, in favour of Christ. Such flight from sexuality is a topos of pre-Reformation female sanctity, compulsory for union with God; 20 in fact, the preservation of virginity, virginity under threat, normally either accompanies, or more often serves as the catalyst for, women martyrs’ persecution. Protection of virginity – the primary mark of the woman’s faith, as Mary’s is of her perfection – provides the basis of and justification for her defiance of familial and secular authority, in effect, patriarchy, a justification unavailable to Askew. This is important, because compounding the problem of Askew’s sexual maturity, she had, during the years before her death, rejected her marital status, seeking a divorce and even refusing to use her married name, but she had not (as far as can be known), in the manner of traditional female saints, articulated her separation from her husband as a flight from sexuality; and nor did Bale for her. While he could not have known when he began their production that they would serve this specific purpose, the two works, the Image and the Actes, provide an image of purity allowing Askew to emerge from his pen as a martyr, by providing a means of reconciling her sexual maturity and her provocative behaviour to her membership of the body of Christ’s bride, the true church.


Moral behaviour aside, however, Askew, like Oldcastle, attains her sanctity in the manner of pre-Reformation martyrs, male and virgin, by choosing death over idolatry. In their suffering, Bale’s martyrs constitute leaves in a sanctified family tree rooting them in the primitive church, related to Christ and his apostles by their inheritance of persecution. Thus both the Examinations and the Oldcastle account open with comparisons of their subjects to ancient Christian martyrs. Bale’s favourite model for Askew is Blandina, martyred in Lyons in AD 177:21 both young women were ‘yonge and tender’, and while ‘frayle of nature’, they were made strong by God’s grace. Both were ‘lyvelye and quyck’ in the face of death for faith, and ‘deryded the cruelte of the tyrauntes’, the ‘madnesse of the Byshoppes and their speche men’. Both were ‘full of God and hys vertye … to the very ende’ and ‘boldelye reprehended the pagane prestes of their errour’ when ‘upon the scaffolde’. Finally, the ‘sprete of Christ’ gave both of them ‘stomack’ to rejoice in their prisons and deaths.22 Bale’s comparison of Askew to Blandina, all but opening the First Examinacyon, begins with a contrast between the two women’s natural female frailty, and the strength, provided by God, that they exhibit under persecution. In this respect, Bale employs in his description of Askew a strength-in-weakness paradigm, one drawn on again in the Lattre Examinacyon in his reaction to her torture. Like medieval hagiographers, he has been criticized for employing this paradigm in some modern scholarship, according to which he is accused of having undermined his own celebration of Askew by attributing her fortitude and erudition to divine assistance: uncomfortable working with a heroic female subject, he is thought to have reconciled her constancy to her gender by portraying her as a mere vessel through whom God could be seen to work.23 It is certainly easy to chafe at his description of Askew’s persecution as proof of God’s use of the weak and contemptible of the world to undermine the mighty, as in the following passage: The strength of God is here made perfyght by weakenesse. Whan she seemed most feble, than was she most stronge. And gladlye she rejoyced in that weakenesse, that Christes power myght strongelye dwell in her. Thus choseth the lorde, the folysh of thys worlde to confounde the wyse, and the weake to deface the myghtye. Yea, thynges despysed and thought verye vyle, to brynge thynges unto nought whych the worlde hath in most hygh reputacyon … An example of stronge sufferaunce myght thys holye


martyr be, unto all them that the lorde shall after lyke maner put forewarde in thys horryble furye of Antichrist, to the glorye of hys persecuted churche. Amen.24 In what can be seen as a strict adherence to the rules of hagiographic rhetorical form, Bale presents his female martyr as weak, feeble, foolish and despised, a foil for the dramatic realization of God’s power. In this, his description is resonant of the account of Blandina’s death, as it is related in epistolary form in Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century Ecclesiastical History: And Attalus of Pergama, who was the column and base of all our church, & Blandina, through whom Christ shows, they who to men are reviled, and appear unimportant and contemptible, are held in great glory and dignity close to God and because they are prized by him, they show a thing in themselves (reipsa), and do not seem so small as they are in outward appearance … Indeed when all of us were afraid, and also her carnal [earthly] mistress, who herself was one of the martyrs in number, feared lest she would not be confidently steadfast in strong confession due to the weakness of her body, then Blandina was so replenished with manliness (virtute), that those assigned to torment her by turns through day and night … were tired and conceded her to be the victor … and were amazed by how the spirit flowed through her …. The truly blessed woman, such a noble struggler in confession, was thus replenished … and how often she said, I am a Christian woman, and nothing evil has been committed by us.25 The Eusebian description of Blandina’s death begins with a point of contrast to her, her fellow martyr Attalus, a tower of strength. It is through Blandina, more so than through Attalus, that Christ proves that those considered contemptible among men are held by him in great glory. A servant in life, Blandina, given virtute by God, surprises her companions (including her mistress) as well as her enemies, by bravely suffering the worst of possible torments, remaining strong in and by her confession. Both Bale and the Eusebian writer draw on a traditional topos to explain and celebrate the strength of their female martyrs. Askew and Blandina, as persecuted, saintly women, are exemplary of New Testament inversions of value: the judgments of the ‘world’ – men’s traditions – are contrasted to the truth of Christ; the weak of


the world are strong in Christ; the foolish of the world are wise in Christ; the highly esteemed of the world are abominations in God’s sight.26 The Eusebian writer, however, in his celebration of Blandina’s fortitude, is also participating in a hagiographic convention deriving from the vita of another female Christian, the Carthage martyr Perpetua (d. c. 203). Perpetua’s Passio describes in dramatic form the ‘analgesic state’ provided by the Holy Spirit to shield martyrs from the torments of imitatio Christi. 27 Askew, however, unlike Perpetua and Blandina, feels the pain of her torments: her torture and her often difficult imprisonment. Hers is not a painless end. Similarly, while Bale’s Askew is contrasted to the ‘wise’ and ‘mighty’ of the world, her opposite in this respect, unlike Blandina’s, is not another martyr – a Christian man revered for his physical strength – but, as Bale will make clear when discussing her torture, men of evil: the Lord Chancellor Wriothesly, far from posing a positive contrast to Askew, is a ‘slave for Antichrist … without all discressyon, honestye, or manhode’. He and Richard Rich are ‘helle houndes’, more fit for ‘swyne kepynge, than to be of a prynces counsell, or yet to governe a Christen comen welth’.28 Yet, both men are mighty and wise in the eyes of the world. Drawing on a hagiographic topos, Bale modifies it, demonstrating the ignorance of the world’s wise, the inadequacy of the world’s powerful, without posing Askew’s earthly debasement as derivative of her sex. While Blandina’s degraded status derives from her sex and her social position, Askew’s is a symptom of her faith: she is despised because she refuses idolatry, proving herself a member of Christ’s poor flock, the persecuted church. In this, far from appearing as in contrast to a strong, Christian man, her depiction echoes that of Bale’s male martyr, Oldcastle. This other work, published two years before the First Examinacyon, provides a comparative framework against which to consider the depiction of Askew, particularly in regard to issues of gender: Oldcastle is, helpfully, not just a man, but a valiant warrior-knight. While there is no doubt that Bale presents Askew, particularly when dealing with her torture, as provided by God with bodily and moral strength, he also does so for Oldcastle. Thus, while he betrays a stereotypical view of natural sexual difference (in earthly terms Askew is physically weak and Oldcastle strong), he describes both martyrs on the road to death as lambs battling wolves, whose power and wisdom derive from the same source. The two martyrs, male and female, are equal in requiring, and benefiting from, divine assistance.29


Bale opens both the Oldcastle account and the Lattre Examinacyon with Christ’s instruction to his apostles: Most surelye fulfylled Christ that promes in him which he made to his Apostles. Cast not in youre myndes afore hande (sayth he) what answere ye shall make whan these spirituall tyrauntes shall examine your in theyr synagoges / and so delyver you up unto kynges and debytees. For I will geve you soche utteraunce and wysdome in that houre / as all your ennemyes shall never be able to resyst.30 Bale frames both the Oldcastle and Askew accounts as realizations of Christ’s promise. As apostles, both are necessarily persecuted, both examined and, importantly, both given utterance and wisdom by Christ. Far from suggesting that such infusion of wisdom is necessary only to female martyrs, in the Examinations Bale describes Christ’s promise as fulfilled for Albanus, Aaron, Julius and others, and he explicitly shows Oldcastle, in his earlier account, benefiting from it as well: under examination, Oldcastle ‘put his lyfe into the hande of God / desyring his onely spyrit to assist him in his next answere’. 31 His reliance upon God for his very words is a deliberate construction of Bale’s, a modification of his source. The Tyndale version reads differently: ‘And in the meane tyme he perceivyd that the uttermoste malice was purposed ageinst him how so ever he answered: therefore he putt his lyfe in goddis hande and answered thus as foloweth.’32 When read his condemnation, Bale’s Oldcastle declares: ‘I wyll stande to them even to the very death, by the grace of my eternall God.’33 Similarly, either by her own devices or thanks to Bale’s editing, Askew refers repeatedly to herself as persevering by the help of God, for example after her racking: ‘my lorde God (I thanke hys everlastynge goodnesse) gave me grace to persever, and wyll do (I hope) to the verye ende.’34 As Knott suggests (accepting Askew’s authorial voice): ‘it is hard to imagine her objecting to Bale’s claim that “Christ’s Spirit was mighty in her” when she so clearly saw herself as enabled by grace to play a role for which God had destined her.’35 Bale’s stereotyping of physical attributes reveals itself in both his martyrologies; but in both accounts worldly, gendered and class-based attributes collapse in the face of his subjects’ apostolic status. In the opening pages of the Oldcastle account, the knight, like Askew, is described in gendered terms relative to his worldly status: ‘In all adventerouse actes of worldlye manhode / was he ever bolde / stronge / fortunate / doughtye / noble / & valeaunt’.36 He lived a life of idolatry and


privilege until his point of conversion, when ‘he had ones throughlye tasted the Christen doctrine of Johan Wycleve and of his disciples’, after which ‘he abhorred all the supersticyouse sorceryes … of the proude Romyshe churche’, and ‘brought all thynges to the towche stone of Gods worde’.37 Askew, similarly born of ‘verye auncyent and noble stocke’, her father, like Oldcastle, ‘a worthye knight’, having once found the truth, ‘wolde no longer be a false worshypper or ydolatour after the wicked scole of antichrist’.38 From their conversions, both martyrs lose the sinfulness and the privileges of their carnal lives to become persecuted representatives of (and conduits for) spiritual truth, ‘what though the worldes judgementes be farre otherwise’.39 Bale’s Askew, ‘a gentylwoman verye yonge, dayntye, and tender’, is transformed by her imitatio Christi; she moves from weak woman to martyr, in the latter manifestation appearing as a lamb battling wolves, in effect experiencing, through her imitation of Christ, both his strength and his power. Showing apostolic strength-in-weakness, it is by her very weakness as the lamb that Askew is able to withstand her torture: Where coulde be seane a more clere and open experyment of Christes dere membre, than in her myghtye sufferynges? Lyke a lambe she laye styll without noyse of cryenge, and suffered your uttermost vyolence, tyll the synnowes of her armes were broken, and the strynges of her eys peryshed in her heade. Ryght farre doth it pase the strength of a yonge, tendre, weake, and sycke woman (as she was at that tyme to your more confusyon) to abyde so vyolent handelynge, yea, or yet of the strongest man that lyveth. Thynke not therfor but that Christ hath suffered in her, and so myghtelye shewed hys power, that in her weakenesse he hath laughed your madde enterpryses to scorne, Psalm. 2.40 Askew lies still like a lamb – the lamb – enduring torments beyond those possible for the strongest of men to survive. In suffering, however, she is not merely a weak woman; she is also, and more importantly, a vessel imbued with the power of the suffering Christ. As a woman, she would not be able to survive Wriothesley and Rich’s violence; but neither would she as a man, even the strongest of men, a man, perhaps, like Oldcastle. Transformed, however, into a platform for the portrayal of Christ’s power – a power manifested physically in her – Askew does survive. Her natural, female weakness may serve dramatically to underline the power of Christ, not to mention the cruelty


of her persecutors, but Christ’s assistance is not necessary to her because she is a woman, and were Wriothesley and Rich’s victim a man, he would benefit from it as well: Oldcastle would also need it here, as he does in his own ordeals, during which he experiences a parallel transformation to Askew’s, moving from male warrior to a helpless lamb made strong by Christ. For Bale, Askew’s and Oldcastle’s helplessness in the face of persecution, and their necessary assistance by God, are among the ‘expresse tokens that Christ sealeth hys martyrs with’: ‘They apered as shepe amonge wolves. They were throwne in stronge preson. They were brought forth into counsels and synagoges. Their answers were out of Gods sprete (as herin apereth) and not out of their owne. They were revyled, mocked, stocked, racked, execrated, condempned, and murthered.’41 In their suffering, the martyrs of the primitive church fulfilled Christ’s promise to his apostles – ‘I sende yow forth … as shepe amonge wolves’ – as do modern martyrs, like Askew, her friend John Lascelles and Oldcastle, ‘a lambe among wolves’.42 Whether strong knight in life or tender gentlewoman, Askew and Oldcastle both become lambs, weak until made strong by God, despised and debased according to earthly criteria. Bale’s description of Askew as strengthened and given words by God is no more a reconciliation of her gender with her heroism than similar statements made in the Oldcastle account: rather, it proves her status as a beloved apostle and martyr for Christ, a member of his church. Bale’s Askew, helpless like Oldcastle, receives not just strength from Christ, but also wisdom, articulated wisdom. In her erudition she differs from most of the women of pre-Reformation martyrology, including (despite Bale’s assurance that she, like Askew, ‘boldelye reprehended the pagane prestes of their errour’) Blandina. As Knott points out, the hallmark of the ancient and medieval martyr is passivity and resignation. The martyr triumphs by his or her ability to endure physical torment (assisted by God), not by erudition: Bale creates, for Askew, ‘the sort of Blandina he would like to see as a model’. 43 Indeed, the Eusebian Blandina is seen to speak to her tormentors only once: ‘Christiana sum, nec mali quicquam a nobis committitur’. 44 This is hardly a diatribe. The weapon of Bale’s Protestant martyr, on the other hand, is the spoken Word of God – not quiet resignation – and the most important sign of his status is his or her vehement, and even vituperative, confession. The essence of the Examinations, therefore, whether edited by Bale or later by Foxe, is Askew’s voice: their attributed authorship. They are


presented as a woman’s own words – not just her written words, but as a record as well of her spoken testimony. Askew, or Bale’s Askew, presents herself engaging in verbal combat with a succession of male interrogators, including the Mayor of London, the Bishop of London, the Lord Chancellor and Henry VIII’s entire Privy Council. While the veracity of the Askew account, like Askew’s very authorship of it, can be and is contested, a school of modern criticism has recently developed around two related sets of interaction, both based on the assumption of Askew’s authorship: Askew’s with her examiners, and the Examinations’ two authorial voices (Bale’s and Askew’s) with each other. The point at which discussion of these two sets of interaction meets is in the argument that Askew exhibits, under interrogation, a radically silent, discernibly female voice, one reluctant to engage with ‘male’ theological discourse, but undermined by a bullying editorial Bale. According to such analysis, Bale overwrites the female author’s testimony with his assertive, male, Protestant voice. It is difficult to restore Bale’s Askew to her explicit rejection of the real presence, as fully articulated in the Lattre Examinacyon, without adopting a rhetorical stance treating her words as hers. Instead, for the present purpose, it is important that in so far as she emerges from the First Examinacyon as a reticent examinee, she does so, and is framed by Bale doing so, very much as a persecuted Henrician heretic fighting for her life. Paula McQuade, in a 1994 article considering the legal context in which Askew’s trials took place, argues convincingly that her tactic of evasion under examination constituted an informed attempt to avoid incriminating herself under the Act of the Six Articles.45 McQuade makes a compelling case for Askew being familiar enough with English law to attempt to use the system to her benefit, locating in the Examinations what she calls her ‘real brilliance’, her consistent foregrounding of her illegal imprisonment without formal indictment. 46 Having used evasion to avoid indictment, and hoping still to appeal to the law, it is unlikely, McQuade argues, that Askew would consciously incriminate herself during later examination. McQuade effectively demonstrates that a defendant in Askew’s position would necessarily use reticence under examination if interested in surviving her prosecution. Nevertheless, and with a nod to McQuade, critics continue to read Askew’s ‘silence’ as indicating either a distinctly female and thus indefinable faith, or an awareness of her gendered exclusion from theological discourse. McQuade’s argument, however, focuses on Askew’s status as a femme covert attempting to negotiate a common law that did not recognize married women as


legal entities. But by refusing to reveal her heretical sacramental beliefs, Askew, or Askew as presented under Bale’s pen (authorial or editorial), was in fact participating in a strategy frequently and famously drawn upon both by male and female Lollards and, more tellingly, by her male colleagues in the more mainstream Henrician reformist community.47 As Susan Wabuda has demonstrated with regard to Edward Crome and a number of other notable reformers, ‘the use of ambiguity without lying outright’ was a common strategy integral to the rhythm of Henrician evangelical life and survival. 48 Crome and Latimer, both of whom were known and respected by Askew, as well as Lascelles, her fellow martyr and intimate, used strategies of equivocation under interrogation or dissimulation in public recantation (or both) to attempt to survive persecution, while affirming their beliefs in the process for the benefit of their fellow reformers.49 No independent records of Askew’s private interviews or public examinations are extant, and it is impossible to know to what extent, if any, the published Examinations accurately reflect her responses either before the quest opening the First Examinacyon or during her subsequent interrogations. What is clear, however, is that the Examinations present her, in the manner of her contemporaries, both manipulating her own testimony to try to avoid self-incrimination and, despite her necessary reticence, revealing her evangelical beliefs so that her reading audience will understand them. In the process of this description, both the Askew presented in the Examinations and the elucidating Bale recognize the legitimacy of discretion for the sake of self-preservation. Wabuda has skilfully traced and contextualized Crome’s three ambiguous or ‘false’ recantations and his ultimate capitulation of June 1546.50 His false recantations were designed not just to save him, but also to convince others of his strength of faith.51 Similarly, Bale’s Askew signs a false confession towards the end of the First Examinacyon, which earns her release from her first imprisonment. This event follows a series of interrogations under which, while avoiding selfincrimination, Askew leaves an audience intimate with scripture in no doubt as to her beliefs. This is so from the beginning of The First Examinacyon, which opens with her interview before the quest, conducted by Christopher Dare: first Christofer dare examined me at Sadlers hall, beynge one of the quest, and asked yf I ded not beleve that the sacrament hangynge over the aultre was the verye bodye of Christ reallye. Then I demaunded thys questyone of hym, wherfore S. Steven was stoned


to death? And he sayd, he coulde not tell. Then I answered, that no more wolde I assoyle hys vayne question.52 Accused next of claiming ‘how God was not in temples made with handes’, Askew refers Dare to Acts 7 and 17, and when asked to elucidate, answers that she ‘wolde not throwe pearles amonge swine, for acorns were good ynough’. In this her first exchange with the quest as it is presented in the First Examinacyon, Askew backhandedly denies the real presence, and thus reveals herself as a heretic according to the Act of the Six Articles. Her comparison of herself to Steven, stoned to death for insisting that God is not to be found in temples made with human hands, suggests rather than obscures her position, as does her reference to Acts 17, in which Paul reinforces Steven’s teaching. While expressing herself through biblical reference rather than explicit testimony, Askew reveals the source of her system of belief, as in Acts 17 the nobles of Thessalonica, ‘receaved the worde with all diligence of mynde / & searched the scriptures dayly’.53 Two fundamental tenets of Askew’s system of belief emerge from her first ambiguous answer: the false doctrine of the real presence is rejected as idolatry, and scripture as the source of true doctrine is established. Throughout her interview before the quest, Askew continues to reveal her heterodoxy by referring Dare to the New Testament, exclusively to passages glossed, in the 1534 Tyndale Bible, by shoulder-notes guiding interpretation.54 Were Dare to have turned to Acts 7, for example, as rendered in Tyndale, he would have found that Steven’s words, ‘How be it he that is hyest of all / dwelleth not in temple made with hondes’, are accompanied by an asterisk guiding the reader to a marginal reinforcement: ‘God dwelleth not in temples or churches made with handes’.55 Moving on to Acts 17, against Paul’s praise of the Thessalonians for their reading of scripture, he would have found the more explicit marginal gloss, ‘Searche the scriptures, for by them may ye trye all doctrine’.56 Later during the quest, when asked if she prefers vernacular scripture to the Latin Mass, Askew responds by referring to another New Testament chapter, I Corinthians 14, ‘whereas [Paul] doth saye. If the trumpe geveth an uncertayne sounde, who wyll prepare himself to the battayle?’57 This passage is again glossed by Tyndale – ‘To speake with tonges or with the spirite / is to speake that others understonde not / as prests saye their servyce. To speak with the mynde is to speake that others understonde / as when the preacher preacheth’58 – another shoulder-note reading: ‘Wordes that are not


understonde proffyt not’.59 By citing passages isolated in the Tyndale Bible as articulating the fundamental tenets of the evangelical faith – where it principally departs from traditional orthodoxy – Askew provides clear clues to her reading audience of her faith, clues they would have understood.60 The portrayal of Askew’s discreet if revealing testimony serves to affirm her faith to her reading audience and is an example of her discretion in the face of danger, a danger real and frightening. Askew is not shown embracing martyrdom in the manner of ancient virgins, but fighting for survival in a manner expected and considered legitimate by her peers. While her reference to Steven’s death signals her rejection of the real presence, it also serves to reveal her awareness of her own danger and implicitly identifies her persecutors with the Pharisees who procured the proto-martyr’s death. When asked to be explicit in her answers she refuses, but her refusal takes the form of another scriptural allusion, this time to Matthew 7, according to which Christ teaches: ‘Geve not that which is holy / to doggs / nether cast ye youre pearles before swyne / lest they treade them under their fete / and the other tourne agayne and all to rent you.’ 61 While her answer has the effect of insulting her questioner – Askew’s pearls are too good for Dare, presumably, along with his fellow jurymen, the proverbial swine – this is not its point: her ‘truth’ is not beyond the understanding of her persecutors; rather, expressing it will bring violence upon her. Recognition of the strategic legitimacy of equivocation, and a profound and immediate intimacy with scripture, divides Askew’s contemporary readership from most of her modern audience, who read both according to a vastly different meta-narrative from theirs, and also with a different goal – while we look for the early modern woman in the Examinations, we cannot assume that Askew’s contemporaries, including Bale, shared our obsessions. Her readers would have been reading for her confession, not for her gendered subjectivity. Thus Askew might have drawn, as Kim Coles and Megan Matchinske have argued, on her role as a woman to find room to manoeuvre, as she is shown doing, for example, in the following passage describing an exchange with Bonner:62 Then layd it my Lorde unto me, that I had alleged a serten text of the scripture. I answered that I alleged no other but S. Paules owne saynge … in the xvii. chapter of the Apostles actes … Then asked he me, what my faythe and beleve was in that matter? I answered hym.


I beleve as the scripture doth teache me. Then enquired he of me, what if the scripture doth saye, that it is the bodye of Christ? I beleve (sayd I) like as the scripture doth teache me. Then asked he agayne … My answere was styll, I beleve as the scripture infourmeth me. And upon thys argument he tarryed a great whyle, to have driven me to make hym an answere to hys mynde. Howbeit I wolde not, but concluded thus with hym, that I beleved therin and in all other thynges, as Christ and hys holye Apostles ded leave them … Then he asked my, whye I had so fewe wordes? And I answered. God hath geven me the gyft of knowledge. But not of utteraunce. And Salomon sayth, that a woman of fewe wordes, is a gyft of God, Prover. 19. 63 But if she did so, such manoeuvring did not constitute an inability to express her faith. While Askew may or may not have spoken these words to Bonner, they express a sentiment which has previously been rejected by Askew, as in her represented testimony, and by Bale in elucidation. Well before this interview with Bonner, Askew is seen making plain her disinclination to accept strictures against female speech, her position explicitly supported by Bale.64 This self-effacing assertion must therefore be intended to express something to the Examinations’ readership, something other than merely that Askew was a woman of wit.65 In fact, Proverbs 19 does not read, as rendered here, that a woman of few words is a gift of God, but rather that ‘a discrete woman is the gyfte of the Lord’.66 Askew is seen here, as she is frequently, closing argument with a scriptural reference, but in doing so she creates a red herring. Like Christ’s refusal to throw pearls before swine, repeated by Askew before the quest, Proverbs 19 is a celebration of the use of discretion by both men and women, linking it with wisdom: the wise woman – with knowledge – knows when to keep quiet, but is not required to do so simply because she is female. This misquotation of Proverbs 19, appearing at a point of extreme tension for Askew in the Examinations, constitutes a defence of discretion in the face of persecution, and while Bale is known to have had little tolerance for dissimulation or mental reservation when it came to matters of faith, in his elucidation of Askew’s evocation of Solomon he praises her for her silence, even comparing her, in this respect, to Christ: When Christ stode before Cayphas, he aked hym, moche after thys sort, wherfor he had so few wordes? … Neverthelesse he held hys


peace. Mar. 14. But whan he was ones throughlye compelled by the name of the lyvynge God, to speake, and had uttered a verye fewe wordes, he toke hym at soche advauntage, though they were the eternall vertye, as he was able through them, to procure hys deathe, Matth. 26. Lyke as thys bloudye Bishopp Bonner, of the same wycked generacyon, ded at the lattre, by thys faythfull woman.67 Bale presents Askew’s discretion as a justifiable attempt at selfpreservation, one in keeping with biblical example, and even imitatio Christi. Such discretion was clearly an acceptable strategy for survival among Askew’s peers, men like Robert Wisdom, another of her known associates.68 Wisdom, like Askew writing from prison, adopts the style of Solomon to advise his flock to ‘Lett al yo conversation be such as becometh the children of light in al sobrietie, rightwisnes, and godlines / as ye have ever be taught by the holy gospel of Christ and as I have ever admonished and warned you’. Immediately following these lines, however, he exhorts them to discretion: ‘Walke wisely because of such as yet are estranged from the trewth, and redeem the tyme for the dayes are evill. Let your words and talk be evermore powdred with grace, and beware what ye speake, and to whom.’69 While discretion was consistent with imitatio Christi, however, apostasy was not, as Bale makes clear in his tirade against Nicholas Shaxton who had counselled Askew to recant ‘as he had done’, and then preached his own sermon of recantation at her execution:70 If ye had bene worthye … ye had persevered faithfull and constaunt to the end … But the love of your beastlye fleshe, hath verye farre in yow oveswayed the love of the lorde Jesus Christ. Ye now shewe what ye are in dede, even waverynge reedes with everye blast moved … Yea verye faynt harted cowards and hypocrites, Apo. 3. Ye abyde not in the shepe folde as true shepeherdes, but ye flee lyke hyrelynges.71 Despite showing tolerance of Askew’s discretion, Bale’s intolerance for backsliding was well known. In this respect Askew was a potentially dangerous subject, a fact recognized by Foxe when he reproduced the Examinations in his own martyrology.72 For following her condemnation of June 1546, when she had been tortured and was waiting to die, a secret of hers was made public: her embarrassing recantation of March 1545, unpublished between the release it earned her that


spring and her subsequent re-imprisonment (and condemnation) during the summer of 1546. A heretic to her enemies, she was now potentially apostata to her friends because she had saved her life by denying her faith, and could do so still.73 If the public announcement of her recantation was not bad enough, in light of its publication, Lascelles, her friend and fellow prisoner, seems to have questioned her courage. Whether ultimately composed by Bale or by Askew, the Examinations serve both to confirm her strength of faith and to declare her recantation false. Askew is described signing her confession, written for her by Bonner, in the First Examinacyon and, again, in her letter to Lascelles, included in the Lattre. When given the paper by Bonner to sign, she claims to have insisted to him that she believed, ambiguously, so much ‘as the holye scripture doth agre to’, asking him to add this to the confession. Upon his refusal, however, and under pressure from him and her supporters to sign, Askew does so, with a qualification that provokes Bonner’s fury: ‘I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck churche.’ 74 Within this exchange, by her appeal to the ‘Catholyck churche’,75 Askew is shown acting the part of the pretended recanter, a role she had seen played by men she respected: she signs a confession of faith written by another, which does not reflect her belief, able to do so in conscience through the addition of a few ambiguous words. Bonner in this version of events cannot explicitly reject Askew’s reliance upon the ‘Catholyck churche’, but he clearly understands her deception, as he makes plain. The reader of the Examinations is assured that while she signed a confession in order to save her life, Askew did not betray her faith. Askew’s addendum is missing from the official version of her confession, as copied into Bonner’s register, making of it a ‘true’ recantation. 76 This troubling fact underlies the distressed letter to Lascelles, in which she raises three points: she assures Lascelles that her faith is such that she does not fear death, despite his concerns to the contrary; she tells him that she has heard that the king is angry that she has been tortured; and she informs him, ‘I have redde the processe, whych is reported of them that knowe not the truthe, to be my recantacyon. But as sure as the lorde lyveth. I never ment thynge lesse, than to recant.’ 77 She then describes the circumstances of her recantation as they appear in the First Examinacyon. In the process of assuring her friend that he is wrong to doubt her constancy, she reminds him of her torture, her recent show of steadfastness under extreme pressure. Finally, she refers to her newly publicized confession, called by them


that ‘knowe not the truthe’ a recantation, rather plaintively protesting that she did not mean to recant. The description of Askew’s signing of the confession composed by Bonner constitutes the climactic event of the First Examinacyon, towards which her preliminary interrogations lead. Its publication in June 1546 informs the documents comprising the Lattre and must have haunted the historical Askew as she awaited death. If the version in the Examinations of her agreement to sign the confession is true, then she earned her release from prison using a strategy common to her peers: false recantation. Even if it is not, however, the Examinations, either as an exercise in self-representation or as an element of Bale’s martyrological project, serve, like Crome’s many public statements, to deny her recantation, and at the same time to affirm her faith. Unlike Crome, whose false recantations and explicit refusals to recant were public spectacles, Bale’s Askew can only assure her audience that official reports of her actions are untrue. The Examinations thus serves a double purpose, denying recantation and affirming belief in the process, but also apologizing for it: Askew did not mean to recant, but she might accidentally have done so. Her steadfastness, present and past, is assured, but her past weakness is also implicitly repented. In this, Bale’s Askew resembles not so much Crome as his less audacious friend, and her acquaintance, Robert Wisdom. True recantation and false, however, were very different things, and distinguishable to listening and reading audiences. When Crome, for example, finally recanted his faith in June 1546, he was forced to make his submission clear by admitting to having approached his earlier statements, not ‘with a symple mynde according to the true sense and meaning of them but having one meanynge secreatelye in myne harte knowinge in my conscience the sense and meaning of tharticles to be contrarie to the same’. 78 Similarly, Wisdom was also compelled in a recantation of July 1543 to acknowledge the problem of false confession: ‘howsoever I have counterfett before, thynck not that I counterfett now, for I declare unto you playnely what I am’.79 The implications for members of the evangelical community forced into such humiliation as this is evident in Wisdom’s reaction to his recantation, written for him by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. Wisdom had succumbed to pressure two years earlier, as he admits in his post-recantation apology, the ‘Revocatyon of that shamfull byll that Winchestre divised and Wisdome reedde’.80 He had signed his previous confession, however, under promise that his submission would remain a private affair.81 In his ‘Revocatyon’, he expresses outrage that the document he signed for


Bonner in 1541, having been guaranteed its secrecy, was used by Gardiner in 1543 (much as Askew’s would be in 1546) as evidence of his relapse, and to force either his public recantation or his burning. In the ‘Revocatyon’ of 1543, therefore, he apologizes not just for his public recantation, but also attempts to explain his earlier weakness. In a 1951 article, Sherwin Bailey questions Wisdom’s dangerous decision to write and distribute the ‘Revocatyon’, contrasting him with his fellow recanter, Thomas Becon, who seems to have ‘regarded the affair of July with complete indifference’.82 Bailey suggests as a reason for the difference the true apostasy of Wisdom’s recantation, against the deliberate falseness of Becon’s, a falseness recognized by their evangelical associates.83 Bailey’s argument strikes a chord in its resonance in Wabuda’s: among these men, false recantation was clearly part of the rhythm of evangelical life, but in 1543, having truly recanted, deviating from that rhythm, as Crome would three years later, Wisdom salvaged his experience by producing the ‘Revocatyon’, by which he: meakelie confesseth his frailtie and fearefull weaknes whereby he for feare of dethe fell to this impietie / and shewith himselfe ernestlie repentaunte and sorye of that gret slaundre and occasion of evill that he then comytted agenste the congregation of god: and also desireth all faithefull Christianns to forgive him that offence, and to receive him agein reconciled to the trewe churche of Christe.84 The difference between true and false recantation, as expressed and regretted by Wisdom here, must be viewed as contextualizing the Askew Examinations,85 but unlike Crome, whose eventual ‘true’ recantation left surprise and distrust in its wake, or Wisdom, who pleaded forgiveness for a guilt he could not deny, the Askew of the Examinations finally emerges as an equivocal but intact confessor.86 Shown avoiding explicitly denying her faith, she uses ambiguity to prevent directly implicating herself as a heretic during interrogation, while at the same time affirming her faith to her reading audience. When compelled to put her name to a recantation she does so, but artfully manages, by making the recantation ‘pretended’, to ‘utter the truth’. Her use of evasion under interrogation, while frequently interpreted as indicating a distinctly feminine interiority or an indefinable faith, or both, instead reflects both a savvy awareness of her legal position and a familiarity with and emulation of the tactics of others, like Crome, Latimer and Lascelles, and perhaps even Bale, who himself survived interrogation during the late 1530s. 87


Bale successfully establishes Askew as a Protestant hero. His description of her in many respects defies categorization either as particularly misogynistic or as confined by limitations or expectations of female behaviour or self-expression. Askew is not specifically feminine in her imitatio Christi: in her status, in earthly terms, as a degraded figure; in her necessary receipt of God’s assistance under persecution; in her dissimulation and ambiguity; in her pretended recantation. As a woman, however, and as according to hagiographic tradition, Askew should not have merely participated in imitatio Christi; she should have also emulated the Virgin, in the manner of her ancient martyred sisters. But in this respect Bale’s female martyr could not be manipulated to fit the hagiographic mould. In a pre-Reformation vita, Askew’s release from the obligations of marriage and motherhood by her removal from her family home would be articulated as a freedom from sexuality, one which would itself prove a catalyst to martyrdom. This does not, however, happen for Bale’s Askew. Despite the fact that he could easily have rewritten her marital breakdown as a flight from her marriage bed, Bale’s female martyr experiences no struggle with her sexuality. Even if Bale could have pretended a renewed virginity for the historical Askew, it is impossible to think that he would have chosen to do so. Within the context of his anti-Catholicism, Bale shared with Foxe an agenda unusual among first-generation English Protestants and driving their polemic: to prove the superiority of the married state to that of virginity, for clergy and laity alike. While most of their Protestant contemporaries lauded marriage as preferable to the sexual incontinence they believed was caused by enforced clerical celibacy, they, unlike Bale and Foxe, continued to view true virginity as the more exalted state. 88 More in line with fifteenth-century Lollardy than with his reformist contemporaries,89 Bale was the first English Protestant to articulate a vision of marriage equating it with chastity, while condemning avowed celibacy itself – whether kept or not – as whoredom;90 Foxe did the same years later and in the context of an apocalyptic vision borrowed from Bale, like his friend constructing clerical celibacy as whoredom and thus as a mark of Antichrist. Bale’s approach to Askew’s separation from her husband, therefore, rather than to construct it as a flight from sexuality, is instead explicitly to defend it as reasonable, allowing him to exercise his obsessive hatred of the Catholic institution of clerical celibacy on the one hand, and to formulate a justification of godly women divorcing unbelieving husbands on the other.91 His strategy dovetails with his response to questions about Askew’s moral behaviour as they are shown to be


raised by Bonner in the Examinations. Both issues – Askew’s divorce and her manner of life – are addressed against the background of Bale’s earlier polemic, which serves to eliminate sexual status as a point of concern in his model of martyrdom. In effect, a new, anti-celibate criterion for membership of the true church is developed in the Image and the Actes of Englysh votaryes, allowing the Examinations to show Askew meeting them. Bale centralizes Askew’s marital problems and pursuit of divorce in his elucidation of the passage, early in the Lattre Examinacyon, describing her examination before the Privy Council. ‘Asked of mastre kyme’ (her husband), Askew answers without elaboration that her mind is known on the matter, but that she is willing to discuss it with the king. Bale explains in his commentary that she was married against her will and yet that she ‘demeaned her selfe lyke a Christen wyfe’, having two children with her husband. However, ‘by oft readynge of the sacred Bible’, she converted from ‘all olde superstycyons of papystrye, to a perfyght beleve in Jhesus Christ’. Having been driven for her faith from her husband’s house, he claims, Askew considered herself ‘free from that uncomelye kynde of coacted marryage, by thys doctryne of S. Paul 1 Cor. 7. If a faytfull woman have an unbelevynge husbande, whych wyll not tarrye with her, she may leave hym. For a brother or syster is not in subjeccyon to soch, specyallye where as the marryage afore is unlawfull.’ Askew sought a divorce for this reason and, ‘above all’, because of her husband’s cruel expulsion of her from their home, ‘in despyght of Christes veryte’. She could not, supposes Bale, have considered Kyme ‘worthye of her marryage’ when he so ‘spyghtfullye hated God the chefe autor [sic] of marriage’. 92 Bale, in this elucidation, explicitly supports the idea of a godly woman leaving her unbelieving husband, using, with a certain amount of licence, 1 Corinthians 7, which reads as follows in the Tyndale New Testament: yf eny brother have a wyfe that beleveth not / yf she be content to dwell with him / let him not put her awaye. And the woman which hath to her husbande an infidell / yf he consent to dwell with her / let her nott put hym awaye. For the unbelevynge husbande is sanctified by the wyfe: and the unbelevynge wyfe ys sanctified by the husbande. Or els were youre chyldren unclene: but now are they pure. But and yf the unbelevynge departe / let him departe. A brother or a sister ys not in subiection to soche. God hath called us in peace.93


Bale argues that according to St Paul, believing women can leave unbelieving husbands that ‘wylle not tarry’ with them. According to Paul, however, the believer’s choice extends only so far as to allow their unbelieving spouse to depart. The difference between the unbelieving spouse refusing to tarry and he or she actually leaving is subtle: Kyme’s eviction of Askew could be thought to qualify her departure as his, although to Paul the more desirable outcome would have been for her to find a way to remain – the unbeliever, according to the text, is sanctified by the faith of the believing partner, though it is unlikely that Bale would have credited this in the case of Thomas Kyme. Bale, however, outreaches Paul in his elucidation, unlike him justifying divorce in such cases. Whereas Paul never offers permission for divorce, in fact stating, in 1 Corinthians 7, that the wife is ‘bound to the law as long as her husband liveth’, Bale equates the separation Paul reluctantly allows to justifiable divorce. He then goes further in his extrapolation, stating, and pretending that it follows in Paul, that such divorce is especially forgivable in cases like Askew’s in which the marriage itself is ‘unlawful’, an allusion to her arranged, or ‘uncomelye kynde of coacted’, marriage. Bale’s wholly voluntary admission that Askew was in pursuit of a divorce and his claim that her efforts were just are difficult to reconcile with his broad, and even obsessive, celebration of marriage. In his somewhat deceptive evocation of 1 Corinthians 7 to support Askew, however, he artfully links her suit to the most famous of Pauline defences of marriage, often used by reformers to attack the institution of clerical celibacy. In the paragraph opening 1 Corinthians 7, Paul makes the following oft-quoted assertion: ‘It is good for a man / not to touche a woman. Neverthelesse to a voyde fornicacion / let every man have his wyfe: and lett every woman have her husbande … For it is better to mary then to burne.’ 94 Bale’s use of 1 Corinthians 7 to justify Askew’s pursuit of a divorce, when the chapter if anything promotes marriage as against inappropriate attempted celibacy, is particularly telling when considered against his further argument in Askew’s favour, his support of what he takes to have been her belief that her husband was unworthy of their marriage: as a papist, Kyme hated God, specifically in his role as the architect of marriage. This extraordinary assertion is understandable only in the context of Bale’s obsessive loathing of the Catholic attitude to marriage, symbolized by its clergy’s avowed celibacy, an issue dominating both the Image and the Actes of Englysh votaryes, the work of his immediately preceding the First Examinacyon in chronology of publication.


The institution of clerical celibacy and its imposition on the English church dominate Bale’s attention in the Actes. Through its avowed celibacy, the whorish church, as described also in the Image, pretends spirituality; in reality, however, this ‘vowed wyveless and husbandeless chastyte … altogyther of the devyll’ is proof of the church’s lechery. Bale’s thesis is that despite the struggle of English Christians to maintain a purity of faith, they have been thwarted by the Roman church, which has foisted upon them ‘whoremongers, bawds, bribers, Idolaters, hypocrites, trayters, and most fylthye Gomorreanes, as Godlye men and women’. These the English have been forced to recognize as ‘holye sayntes’, a ‘sort of lecherouse Goddes to be worshypped in our temples, to be our advocates, and to helpe us in our nedes’. As replacing the Roman pantheon of Gods, ‘which ded all their feates in whoredome’, the English have been saddled with ‘Wenefryde, Cuthbert, Dunstane, Oswalde, Anselme, Becket, Brigyde, Audrye, Modwen, Edith, Olith, Ethelburge, and a great sort more of unpure workers out of marryage’.95 Under Bale’s pen, male and female Catholic saints – in the manner of all members of the celibate clergy – reject marriage not in order to remain celibate, but to lead lives of licentiousness. Saint Brigid, for example, upon abandoning her fiancé, ‘wayted longe after upon bishop Machyll’, as did Saint Modwen and her maids for ‘bishop Hiber and his bretherne’.96 Similarly, Saint Keynwirye, a Welsh virgin, ‘contempnynge marriage’, fled to St Michael’s Mount ‘to keep her vowed virgynyte amonge the holye fathers there, as vower with vowers’.97 These descriptions may seem ambiguous, but Bale’s sarcasm in the Actes is palpable. His anecdote about St Dunstan (Archbishop of Canterbury, 959–88) and St Edith of Wilton is both amusing and explicitly vulgar: As Dunstane was on a tyme hallowynge of a churche in the honoure of Saynt devyll, saynt Denys I shuld saye, he behelde the right thombe of … Edithe, than beynge abbesse of wylton, as she was crossyne and blessynge her forhead. And moche delyghtynge therin, he toke yt in hys hande, and sayd. Never might thys thombe peryshe … And after her death he founde all her bodye resolved into ashes, except that thombe and the secrete part under her bellye, for those. ii. partes of her, he had blessed afore.98 Those saints admitted by the church to have been married do not escape Bale’s wrath; in fact they are in some ways worse than the ‘virgins’, for in becoming saints they necessarily abandon their spouses.


St Olith, for example, left her husband for a convent ‘bycause she loved the spirytualte moche better than hym’, making both a whore of herself and a whoremonger of her husband, who was forced to live the rest of his life ‘in most synnefull advoutrie’. Happily and justly, Olith was killed by the Danes in 1113, ‘and her whore howse (nondrye I shuld saye) utterlye destroyed. Yet’, Bale goes on, ‘was she in the Popes churche allowed for a stynkynge martyr, for contempnynge marriage.’99 This is the point to Bale: the demotion of marriage as an institution in Roman religion is, in effect, the promotion of whoredom, and this promotion of licentiousness is the single criterion in the Roman church for sanctification. But while the priests of Rome prefer whoremongering and sodomy to marriage, he rants, never in the Gospel is marriage condemned, and Christ’s apostles were married men. Nevertheless, among Catholics ‘Whoredome [is] estemed most holynesse’: ‘Se’, he laments, ‘what advauncementes they have for stynkynge whoredome, and how lytle devocyon to chast maryage instituted of god … judge they whoredome holyness, & wholsom maryage synne.’100 ‘Come out of Sodome ye whoremongers and hypocrytes,’ he commands, 101 gloating over the violence served by the Danes on the monks of Canterbury in 1012: And as he [Archbishop Elphegus] and hys monkes were able to geve nomore moneye, they tythed them after thys sort. Thy slewe always ix. and reserved the tenth to perpetuall sorowe and sevytude, tyll they had mourthered of them to the nombre of more than. ix. hondred, there and in other quarters a brode. And the most part of them they hynge up by the members, which was a playne sygnyfycacyon, that plage to come than upon them for their Sodometrye and most violent contempt of christen marriage.102 The Catholic church despises marriage, preferring whoredom and sodomy to this holy state, instituted by God himself. Being Catholic, therefore, means hating marriage and God who instituted it, thus being Catholic makes Kyme unworthy of marriage to a godly woman. Askew’s desire to divorce a Catholic, marriage-hating supporter of clerical sodomy is, to Bale, wholly supportable. Bale condemns the abandonment of their marriages by those considered saints by the Catholic church on the basis that their choices were made for the purpose of pursuing licentiousness. Askew, on the other hand, is seen by Bale as driven by a different agenda. His justification of her pursuit of a divorce, as intended to rid her of the Catholic idolatry


and whoremongering represented by Kyme, constitutes a defence of divorce by the godly against the ungodly. For to Bale, Kyme is not just an unbeliever, he is an agent of the Antichrist’s false church, a church marked as such, as proven in the Image, by its promotion of whoredom. Removing herself from the authority of her husband, and attempting to do so legally, marks Askew’s allegiance to chastity, as a true and faithful bride of Christ. Askew’s separation from her husband, her refusal to use her married name, her verbosity and lack of male protector/chaperon, made her a woman, in life and in death, vulnerable to accusations of promiscuity. 103 According to the Examinations, she was put in the position of defending her chastity during interrogation by the Bishop of London, but Bale’s response in his elucidation of the passage describing that discussion is unexpected. Bonner is shown remarking to Askew, ‘there are manye that reade and knowe the scripture, and yet do not follow it, nor lyve therafter’, to which she responds, ‘my lorde, I wolde wyshe, that all men knewe of my conversacyon and lyvynge in all poyntes, For I am so sure of my selfe thys houre, that there are non able to prove anye dyshonestie by me. If you knowe anye that can do it, I praye yow brynge them fourth.’104 This exchange is about Askew’s sexuality – in context, a woman’s ‘honesty’ is her chastity, and her ‘conversation’ her moral behaviour.105 Bonner’s suggestion that Askew fails to live according to scripture implies moral laxity; this is certainly how he is shown being interpreted by Askew, as revealed by her answer, as well as by Bale, for he uses this exchange to raise the issue of clerical celibacy. Ignoring the question of Askew’s lifestyle – implying either that he considers it irrelevant or that he feels he cannot defend her on this issue, or both – instead he attacks the church’s withholding of the option of marriage from their clergy, beginning his elucidation thus: ‘I marvele that Byshoppes can not se thys in themselves, that they are also no followers of the scriptures. But paraventure they never reade them … Christ sayd to the hypocrite. Whye seist thu a moate in thy neybers eye, and consyderest not the great beame that is in thyne owne eye? Luce 6. Matth. 7.’ He continues, chastising the clergy for coveting honours and wealth, and then: ‘If we loked so earnestlye to Christes instytucyons, as we loke to the popes to be observed, these wolde also be seane to, by acte of parlement, so wele as prestes marriage whom Christ never inhibited.’106 In Bale’s next elucidation but one, in response to the confession of faith that Bonner presses Askew to sign, he launches into a full-scale attack on clerical celibacy. The confession reads in part: ‘I beleve that


they which are howseled at the handes of a prest, whether hys conversacyon [read behaviour] be good or not, do receive the bodye and bloude of Christ in substaunce reallye.’ Bale is outraged: We must now beleve in the bawdye of prestes, or that their Sodometrye and Whoredome for want of marriage, can be no impediment to their Godmakynge. What is it else to be sworne unto the beleve of soche articles, but to honour their abhomynable lecherye? O most swinish sacryfyers of Baal … Ye have turned the grace of God, into your lecherie, denyenge our onlye governour Jhesus Christ.107 Bale implies, in his elucidation of Bonner’s questioning of Askew’s morality – and her defence of it – that he cannot defend Askew’s chastity. He does not attempt to do so, and twice in his immediate response to her self-defence he addresses Bonner’s question in the manner of Christ defending Mary Magdalene, signalling the bishop’s hypocrisy, then closing his elucidation: ‘Godly ded thys woman in defendynge here her innocencye.’ Why? Not because she is chaste, but rather, ‘For S. Peter sayth, i. Petri 4. Se that non of yow suffer as an evyll doer. But in your harde sufferynges, commit your sowles unto god with wele doynge, as unto your faythfull creator.’108 In his next elucidation – again following hard on the heels of Bonner’s implication but otherwise without contextual cause (this elucidation follows Askew’s description of being pressured to sign the confession) – he writes: Thys godlye woman wold corrupt her fayth with no soche beggerye, least she in so doynge shuld admit them and their pope to sytt in her conscience above the eternall God … A vyrgyne was she in that behalf, redeemed from the earthe and folowynge the lambe, and havynge in her forehead the fathers name written.109 In the Actes, Bale describes virginity: ‘True vyrgynyte ys a fayth uncorrupted, or a beleve governed by the onlye worde of God without all superstycyons of men’. Of this virginity alone was Mary commended,110 as he also argues in the Image, in a discussion of Revelation 14, in which it is written that the redeemed are ‘not defiled of woman for they are virgins’: Never is the maydenhede of the soule lost, tyll erroniouse doctrine be received from the messengers of Antichriste the Byshoppes and Hipocrites. The virgyns, or uncorrupted belevers do folow the lambe


whersoever he become. They go after Christe, that belevinge his worde, doeth fashion their lyves unto it … the spirit of the Lorde hath purifyed their hartes throughe faythe.111 Askew should be contrasted, as ‘true sylver’ is to ‘rustye yron’, to the false saints who earn their status through a rejection of marriage; in elucidating the contrast Bale reiterates in brief some of the stories of false virginity included in the Actes.112 Sectaries (priests, nuns, monks, Catholic saints) know nothing of ‘true vyrgynyte’ because ‘they chefelye depende upon mennys tradycyons and rules’. Like Mary, Askew is innocent, not because she has lived a physically chaste life, but because she has committed her soul to God, which is evident in her rejection of ‘soche beggarye’ – the man-made traditions of the anti-Christian church. This makes her sexual history – her disorderliness – irrelevant. It makes her chaste; even a virgin. Bale’s description of Askew’s spiritual virginity is entrenched in his apocalyptic, as expressed in the Image, which he was writing at the time of her execution. Her story, as he claims in the opening paragraph of the preface to the First Examinacyon, is exemplary of the truth of Revelation’s prophecy of the ‘horryble persecucyon of Antichrist’ against Christ’s true church, and evidence of the imminence of Christ’s return, his victory over Antichrist, and the ‘lattre judgement daye’. Askew is one of the souls described in Revelation 6, revealed with the opening of the fifth seal, of those who ‘were kylled for the worde of God, and for the testimony whiche they had’. When they cry with the breaking of their seal, ‘howe longe taryest thou lorde, holy and true to iudge & to avenge our bloude on them that dwell on the earthe’, they are told to be patient, for their vengeance will take place when the prophesied number of their brethren have shared in their martyrdom.113 Bale’s paraphrase of the opening of the fifth seal and other passages in Revelation highlights the bestowal upon the martyred souls of ‘long whyte garmentes … verye large and comelye’, which spred upon them ‘a full innocencye, perfyghtnesse, and cleareness’. The garments represent the ‘inestumable [sic] purenesse by Chryste, for his verities sake they dyed’, and indicate that the martyrs are now joined with him in ‘peace, ioye, and swetnes’.114 The image of the gowns are specifically evoked as well in Bale’s elucidation of the First Examinacyon, during his praise of Askew’s description of her refusal to submit to Bonner: Hys [Bonner’s] sekynge was here, to make her to worshyp the first beast, whose deadlye wounde is healed agayne Apoc. 13. But she


wolde not so have her name [e]raced out of the lambes boke of lyfe. Apoca. 20. Rather wolde she contende to the ende, hopynge by the myght of hys sprete, at the last to overcome, and so to be clothed wyth the promysed whyte aparell, Apoca. 3. White garments are repeatedly referred to in Revelation, and thus also in Bale’s Image. In his commentary on the fourth chapter he describes them as ‘aparell of innocencye’, worn only by those whose ‘workes were pure and cleane before God, risynge onlye of fayth, and were never defyled wyth the fylthy tradycions of men’.115 In Revelation 7 John sees ‘comely persones, which are thus beutefully aparelled in long white garmentes, large & fayre’, carrying palms.116 This description mirrors the frontispieces of both Examinations, in which a woman (Askew) is shown in a long gown, a large book titled Biblia in one hand, a palm frond in the other and a dragon wearing a papal tiara under her feet (figure 1). Bale describes the gowns as large enough to cover the old deformities of those wearing them, and as made ‘whyte in the preciouse bloude of the Lambe’, by those ‘belevyinge to be puryfied by the meryte of his death’. The adorned, like Askew, are therefore ‘accepted, taken, and allowed for the cytezens of heaven’.117 While highlighting the gowns described in Revelation, Bale also alters them to fit a new generation of non-virginal, Protestant martyrs. He removes fleshly chastity from the innocence both bestowed and symbolized by them, at the same time effectively reconciling human sexuality to the idea of purity, saying of the elect: ‘Though concupiscence dwelle in them they shall desyre none evyll.’ 118 This removal of chastity from among the criteria for wearing the white raiment allows martyrs like Askew to be included among those ‘sealed unto god’, who alone may ‘walke before him in whyte garmentes’.119 Modification such as this is typical of Bale, and repeated in his paraphrase of Revelation 14, which describes the 44,000 (male) virgins, redeemed from earth, undefiled by women.120 As with the innocence of the gowned martyrs, Bale transforms the virginity of the redeemed from a physical state into a spiritual one. The virgins have protected their faith from ‘straunge doctrines’ and ‘prophane worshippinges’. The ‘spousage of their soules’ has been ‘broken by no fylthye tradicions of men’ or ‘very whoredome in the spirite’.121 Like St Paul’s ideal Corinthian, they are married, ‘a chast virgine unto Christ’, like Askew with the ‘maydenhede of the soule’ intact. In Bale’s paraphrase of Revelation, physical virginity disappears as an exalted state, the purity


Figure 1 Frontispiece of John Bale, The First Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of god Mastres Anne Askewe…(Marburg, 1546).


described by John becoming a spiritual condition only. The privileging of physical virginity is itself historical proof of the Roman church’s identity as Antichrist, an identity proved by the persecution of women like Askew, the sexually mature and perhaps even unchaste, and yet virgin martyr. Bale fashioned a model of Protestant martyrdom in his martyrologies of Askew and, before her, the medieval Lollard Sir John Oldcastle. While the hallmark of the ancient and medieval Christian martyr is his divinely assisted passivity and resignation in the face of extreme violence, rather than his erudition or verbal combat with his enemies, the Protestant martyr created by Bale differs from the persecuted saint of hagiographic tradition, triumphing through, rather than quiet resignation, erudition, if erudition tempered in the first instance with discretion. He or she confesses the Word, using wisdom bestowed by God. In her strength of confession, Askew, as a woman, does not differ from her male counterpart. Nor is she different from him in her dependence on God for assistance in her suffering. Askew, like Oldcastle, endures excruciating torments, able to do so, again like him, only because she experiences by grace, and in her very suffering, Christ’s power. But the most important identifying characteristic of the female saint of popular pre-Reformation hagiography is her escape from sexual indebtedness – her emulation, in rejected sexuality, of the Virgin Mary. Again, Bale departs from Catholic tradition, refusing to make of Askew – in her separation from her husband – a woman seeking celibacy. He could not pretend her to be a virgin in life – either true or honorary – but he did make her one in death, virginal through her rejection of men’s traditions: her rejection of idolatry. His construction of her spiritual virginity, in his elucidation in the Examinations, emerges more broadly in his other writing, contextualizing his martyrology both intellectually and chronologically. The context he created serves as background as well for Foxe’s later treatment of female martyrdom, both Askew’s – whose life was known and death celebrated before he came to her – and those of the many women burned in the fires of the 1550s.

4 Gospelling Sisters and Women ‘Goinge up and Downe’: Foxe and his Detractors1

Foxe is often lauded by modern critics as the liberator of Askew’s Examinations for the simple fact of having reproduced them in the Acts and Monuments without Bale’s elucidation. In the quest for that rare commodity, the early modern, female voice, critics have tended both to read the first-person texts claimed as Askew’s against Bale’s elucidation of them in the early editions of the Examinations and to find in Foxe’s treatment of them a more liberated, less encumbered, female voice. In a recent article on Foxe’s editing of the Examinations for the Acts and Monuments, however, Thomas Freeman and Sarah Wall take issue with this sort of approach to the Examinations, arguing that far from providing a medium for Askew’s unencumbered self-expression, Foxe actively framed and modelled the Examinations such that he, as much as Bale before him, must be considered not as the presenter of her voice, but as a collaborator in the actual production of her testimony. Drawing attention to Foxe’s textual interventions into, and his aesthetic choices for shaping, the body of the Examinations, Freeman and Wall identify some of the material ways in which he ‘imprints his influence, his beliefs, and his politics all over Askew’s narrative’. 2 In this they challenge the idea that Askew, as primary author, can be read against the intervention (or its lack) of either of her first two, male editors: as no autographed manuscript of any part of the Examinations survives, Askew can, as a discrete authorial voice, be contrasted neither to Bale nor to Foxe. It is possible, however, to contrast Foxe’s Examinations of Anne Askew to Bale’s Examinations of Anne Askew.3 For example, as Freeman and Wall note, Foxe, unlike Bale, divides the Examinations text into paragraphs for the purpose of dramatic effect; Bale’s section divisions in the first editions occur only to allow for the insertion of his own commentary, and 73


while in the 1550 edition (Foxe’s base text), which omits Bale’s elucidation, the text is divided into only eleven paragraphs, Foxe divides it into 29 paragraphs in the first edition of the Acts and Monuments (1563), and 66 in the second (1570). In addition, Foxe occasionally adds words or phrases to the Bale text to improve its rhythm, creating alliterative dyads similar to those characterizing, and Freeman and Wall suggest modelled upon, the 1549 English Prayer Book.4 Apart from these stylistic changes, however, Foxe also makes some more striking alterations in his reproduction of the Examinations, particularly in the sections dealing with Askew’s recantation, her torture and her execution. Drawing on the testimony of living witnesses, he elaborates on the descriptions of her torture and death, enhancing the spectacular value of both as well as the passionate fortitude of the martyr. He also both acknowledges the dangerous implications of Askew’s reported recantation and attempts to mitigate them, by printing the copy of the version still extant in Bonner’s register, and challenging its veracity.5 Freeman and Wall have given a valuable account of Foxe’s methodology in reframing and enhancing the story of Askew’s imprisonment and death. As they argue, particularly beginning in the second edition of the Acts and Monuments, Foxe makes of her story a watershed moment in the history of the English church, a ‘keystone’ for a number of related themes: the determination of evil counsellors to block reform; the responsibility of the monarch nevertheless to carry it out; and the consequences for the nation of his or her failure to do so. Foxe’s emphasis on these themes is contextualized by his dissatisfaction, growing during the 1560s and never abated, with Queen Elizabeth’s religious policy, a frustration which he felt in common with a number of his fellow reformers, especially those with whom he had shared religious exile during Mary’s reign. He compares Elizabeth unfavourably to Askew, making his female martyr not just a religious icon, but a ‘politically charged figure’ as well.6 While Freeman and Wall argue that Foxe intended for Askew, like his other martyrs, to serve as a ‘model to exhort readers to godliness in their daily lives’ (while Bale’s Askew is a model to exhort them to constancy in the face of persecution),7 they also suggest that he ‘very likely … thought that in some respect, Askew was not an appropriate model for the godly to imitate’. They come to this surprising conclusion based on the fact that while in the 1559 Latin forerunner to the English Acts and Monuments, the Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum, Foxe offers an introduction to the Examinations declaring that martyrs should be imitated by Christians in their daily lives and that no martyr has ever been more

Gospelling Sisters 75

praiseworthy than Askew, this introduction does not appear in any of the editions of the English Acts and Monuments. Questioning this, they suggest that, by 1563, Foxe had come to disapprove of Askew’s marital history, a history he was not aware of when working on the Rerum, as it is only revealed in Bale’s elucidation of her texts, elucidation missing from Foxe’s base-text.8 Having, however, discovered her troubled history between publishing the Rerum and putting together the new Acts and Monuments, he decided to tell her story without explicitly offering her up as a model for virtuous behaviour. Faced with the reality that when Foxe was preparing the Rerum for publication during the late 1550s he was living in Basle with Bale – who obviously knew Askew’s story – Freeman and Wall rather implausibly suggest that ‘certainly, Bale could have told Foxe about this issue, but there was no obvious reason for him to have done so’.9 Freeman and Wall’s suggestion, that Foxe was troubled enough by Askew’s marital problems to tone down his presentation of her as a model of godly living, is consistent with an argument offered by Freeman in another article concerned primarily with Foxe’s editorial treatment of female supporters – or sustainers – of male, Marian martyrs, in which he notes the divergence between reformers’ private tolerance of female marital disobedience for the sake of avoidance of idolatry and their concern publicly to deflect Catholic accusations that Protestantism promoted female misconduct. Freeman convincingly argues in this earlier study that Foxe and his colleague Henry Bull, editor of the Letters of the Martyrs (1564), carefully edited correspondence between imprisoned Protestant men and their female sustainers in order to remove references to the women’s sometimes questionable activities, theological erudition and life-choices.10 Noting that ‘Protestant apologists were clearly embarrassed’ by charges that they encouraged evangelical women to disobey their husbands, Freeman compares Foxe’s account of Askew’s martyrdom to Bale’s, concluding that both writers edited her life in a manner reflecting discomfort, but that while Bale chose to offer an explanation for her separation from her husband, Foxe simply refused to mention Askew’s marital difficulties or, indeed, those of Elizabeth Brown and Joyce Hales, two ‘sustainers’ of Marian martyrs. In his discussion of female sustainers, Freeman also briefly addresses Foxe’s portrayal of his often acerbic and aggressive women martyrs, arguing that when he ‘had to describe female Protestant martyrs engaging in sharp, often acrimonious, religious debate with the authorities’, he modelled them on an inflexible or ‘procrustean’ paradigm, employed


by Eusebius of Caesarea ‘to describe female martyrs in the early Church, of the Holy Spirit working through weaker instruments to confound the mighty’.11 Like other critics engaged in discerning Foxe’s attitude to women, Freeman is influenced by clearly misogynistic passages in the Acts and Monuments, such as the famous one below, a diatribe against the cruelty of the Marian Catholic authorities: Who can witholde himselfe from bitter teares, to see the madding rage of these pretensed catholickes, who being never satisfied with bloud to mainteine theyr carnall kingdome, presume so hyly to violate the precise law of Gods commaundementes in slaying the simple poore lambes of the glorious congregation of Jesus Christ, and that for the true testimony of good conscience, in confessing the immaculate Gospell of theyr salvation. What hart will not lament the murdering mischief of these men, who for want of worke, do so wrecke theyr time on sely poore women, whose weake inbecillitie the more it ought to be helped, or at least pitied, and not oppressed of men that be stronger, and especially of priestes that should be charitable. But blessed be the Lord omnipotent, who, supernaturally, hath indued from above such weake creatures with such manly stomacke and fortitude, so constantly to withstand the uttermost extremitie of these pitiless persecutours. 12 Earning the vitriol of feminist critics, Foxe proves himself here fully signed up to a misogynist commonplace – one whose undoubted existence informs much interpretation – according to which women are by nature weaker than men, both physically and mentally. Foxe’s female martyrs have found small (if growing) space in the vast body of scholarship devoted to the Acts and Monuments and other early modern Protestant martyrology. This is surprising given the attention that gender has received in study of pre- (and post-) Reformation Catholic hagiography, but there is a number of possible reasons for it: Foxe’s women martyrs are difficult to categorize; most of them are described only in their persecution, with little attention given to their lives; many ‘good’ women appear in the vast Acts and Monuments who are neither martyred nor, perhaps, even members of the godly elect; Foxe’s work is itself cumbersome enough to make thorough analysis difficult; and little remains of the women martyrs among Foxe’s papers, making detection of his ‘modelling’ of them difficult. Despite, therefore, Roland Bainton’s 1973 suggestion that the Acts and Monuments is the best existing source for information about Tudor women,13


it has been little used as such or (even much) as a source for Foxe’s – or more broadly reformist – ideas about women and gender. These problems are exacerbated by the apparent inconsistency between Foxe’s obvious misogyny and patriarchal ethic, and his portrayal of women as godly martyrs who clearly exceed the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour, by quarrelling publicly and showing contempt for their male betters, and, more shockingly, by disobeying and even separating from their husbands. The few scholars who have approached Foxe from the point of view of gender have struggled to reconcile such behaviour, as he describes it in the Acts and Monuments, with what we know about early modern ideas, and in particular postReformation ideas, about female virtue and its presumed necessity for social and political order. As has been noted in much modern scholarship, a woman’s virtue, honour and reputation were viewed in early modern England through the lens of her sexual reputation. 14 Not just physical chastity, but also silence and obedience defined women’s honour (and that of the men connected with them), with dishonour defined by the opposite characteristics; thus, as the former was inextricable with chastity, so was the latter with sexual deviance. While until the late 1980s discussion about the impact of reformed thinking on women and ideas about gender tended to argue for growing opportunity and esteem for early modern women, depending on their confessional context,15 it is now clear that severe restrictions on women’s behaviour and opportunity for self-expression emerge in both post-Reformation Protestant discourse and Counter-Reformation Catholic writing. Recent monographs, often taking the form of local studies, are revealing the increased limitation on European women’s autonomy and freedom of movement across confessional boundaries, in the context of both Protestant and Catholic Reformation – what is now being called ‘the Reformations’. As Merry Wiesner has recently suggested, ‘if any Reformation was successful in the sixteenth century, it was that “of the women” in the first sense, a restriction of women’s sphere in independent actions and an increase in the power of male heads of households, both temporal and spiritual’. 16 It seems that rising concerns about gender and order in Protestant Augsburg, for example, accompanied by the enhanced inscription of women in the household, were echoed in Catholic Seville, where a ‘theology of purity … equated the good and the true with conformity to gender expectations’.17 If the ‘moral ethic’ of the Reformation must be understood as a ‘theology of gender’,18 so must that of the CounterReformation, which also manifested itself in increased control of


marriage and confinement of women in the household, as well as through enhanced claustration in cloister and brothel. In both contexts women outside or defying male authority and control were perceived as socially threatening. In this context it is not surprising, as Freeman and others have noted, that reformers in England and elsewhere were concerned to counteract accusations that they encouraged their female converts to marital disobedience. While such concern was problematized, as Freeman and Susan Wabuda have both noted, by the cruel trap women often found themselves in as their confessional and marital loyalties clashed, given the ease with which a woman’s credibility could be brought into question through an attack on her sexual honour as well as the importance of martyrs’ integrity for the purpose of religious propaganda, Foxe’s portrayal of women martyrs is nevertheless often unexpected. 19 The temptation has been to explain this by following traditional interpretations of pre-Reformation historiography: in the words of Roland Bainton, Foxe delighted in his women martyrs’ ‘tart, smart, pert, audacious, and superbly defiant words and deeds’, which served to ‘illustrate the point that the weaker vessel when filled with the Holy Spirit is powerful to pull down strongholds’.20 Foxe, in the tradition of Christian hagiography, both peppers his text with examples of subversive female behaviour and denies it its possible sociopolitical implications by presenting it as the work of God, rather than of the women themselves. Bainton’s understanding of Foxe’s portrayal is echoed in Freeman’s recent work (as above): while showing the strength of God in and by their very weakness, the women martyrs are not strong in themselves. Most recently, Susannah Brietz Monta has stressed Foxe’s use of the Eusebian ‘strength-in-weakness’ paradigm, which she sees as serving its own testimonial function, ‘while that testimonial purpose legitimates defiant speech’. 21 Monta problematizes gender in Foxe in a way that previous scholars have not, pointing out that it cannot be seen as a free-floating category in the Acts and Monuments (or elsewhere in early modern literature), one non-relational to subject or genre, or, indeed, the individual accounts in Foxe’s work. She does, however, see Foxe in a tense relationship with his difficult women martyrs, one that he attempts to overcome by emphasizing their uniqueness, thus mitigating the radical implications of his accounts. Ultimately, as she argues in an article on Askew, the strength-in-weakness paradigm allows him to show female martyrs as equal to men in fortitude, wisdom and strength, while retaining their inherently weak female bodies and brains.22


As in much feminist interpretation of Bale’s editing and elucidation of the Askew Examinations, Bainton, Freeman and Monta, at least by implication, detect a fundamental difference between Foxe’s treatment of his female and male martyrs: if the women martyrs show wisdom or fortitude as weak vessels in which God can be seen to work, surely the male martyrs – against which these naturally weak women must be measured – necessarily resist idolatry and show constancy in the face of persecution by drawing on their natural, masculine strength. Foxe, however, does not draw his sexed martyrs according to such a gendered dichotomy, as neither did Bale before him. While admittedly he frequently refers to constancy in masculine terms, he does not in doing so, or by describing some female martyrs as ‘sillie poore women’, reveal a need to reconcile female–as opposed to male – constancy to gendered ideas about human potential, as has recently been argued. 23 Rather, he describes martyrs and would-be martyrs as ‘silly’ and ‘simple’ or ignorant, depending on their social status, their education and the quality of their testimony, while dependence on God’s grace for wisdom and strength transcends, as it does in Bale’s martyrology, gender and other points of difference. Foxe uses words like silly and simple to denote either a lack of power (silly) or of education (simple), often appropriate to women who, by definition, normally lack access to both. As the long quote above suggests, he considers the persecution of women as particularly exemplary of Catholic cruelty, and while revealing a misogynistic tendency in his thought as well as an association between fortitude and manliness, passages such as this are misleading when considered in isolation. Women are not alone in the Acts and Monuments in their silliness and/or simplicity, and many women are neither silly nor simple. Nor are they unique in requiring God’s assistance to show ‘manly stomacke and fortitude’. Prest’s wife, for example, an elderly, illiterate spinner, is silly, while Joyce Lewes, a literate gentlewoman, is never described in that way. 24 The isolated hermit Thomas Parkinson is silly, as is the martyr Julius Palmer, a young man who (much like Foxe himself) had been driven from his fellowship at Oxford, only then to lose his teaching position, and finally to be refused sanctuary in his mother’s home: bereft of help from friends or family, Palmer is silly.25 More telling, however, is Foxe’s use of the word simple, a term which, unlike silly, does imply ignorance, although it can also be used in a more positive sense – with simplicity opposing ceremonialism or scholasticism. This term, which is easy to chafe against when it is used to describe women, is also used frequently to describe persecuted men, especially men of a


certain class or education. Following his description of the burning of Thomas Cranmer, Foxe in fact poses a division in the progress of the Marian persecution, declaring of the archbishop that he was the last of the ‘learned sort of Christes Martyrs burned in Quene Maries tyme … and almost the very middle man of al the Martyrs which were burned in al her raygne besides. 26 His sentiment here is amplified in the first edition: The learned beyng by this tyme (in a maner all) dispatched in this furious rage of persecution, we nowe have little or small matter, to wryte touching the other seely shepe and simple lambes of Christe his flock (yet remaining behynd) upon whom they satisfied styll their bloud thursty & slaughterous affections. I thought it therefore not beside the matter, to admonyshe the Reader, to judge of them, and of such others before specified, as of the deare elect children and true martyrs of God, by whose simplicitie the mercifull wysdome and myghtie power of God was more manifested and shewed, who hath chosen in them the foolyshe and weake thinges of this worlde, to confounde the wyse and myghtie ones, and thynges that are not, to brynge to naught thynges that are.27 Drawing on the biblical inversion of value so important in Bale’s work, as well as in Eusebius’s, Foxe designates as ‘seely shepe and simple lambes’ those – without reference to gender – who are not among the learned sort of Marian martyrs. Equal in election to their earthly betters, these simple souls are helpless, often ignorant, but in those things, proof of the power of God and of his opposition to the mighty of the world. Thus Cicely Ormes was very simple, just as William Nichol was, but she was also ‘zelous in the Lords cause’, while he was ‘so simple a good soule … the more beastly and wretched doth it declare theyr cruell and tirannicall act therin’.28 Prest’s wife was simple, but so was George Eagles, ‘so much the more to be commended … For oftentimes the will and pleasure of God is, to beautifie and adorne hys kingdome with the weake and simple instrumentes of thys world.’29 Foxe, like Bale, celebrates explicit weakness in his martyrs as dramatically showing up both the cruelty of the papists and the power of God: in this he employs the Eusebian strength-in-weakness paradigm as Freeman, Monta and others suggest, but his use of it is neither gender- nor class-specific. 30 Like the silly, poor women imbued with divine fortitude, Thomas Tomkins, an unlearned


weaver, was ‘so endued with Gods mighty Spirit’ that he could not be removed from his confession, and so he ‘sealed up his faith in the flaming fyre, to the glory of God’s holy name, and confirmation of the weake’.31 But Tomkins did not receive this help because he was uneducated or poor. When George Marsh, a learned minister, faltered under interrogation, God, responding to his prayer for assistance, ‘strengthened him with hys spirite of boldnes’, a gift of grace re-emphasized by Foxe in a shoulder-note: ‘G. Marsh strengthened in prison with the boldnes of Gods Spirite’. 32 The lawyer John Philpot, also fearful of martyrdom, prays to God for ‘the spirite of wysdome to speake and make answer’, while Ralph Allerton, initially lacking constancy, was ‘as yet not throughly stayed uppon the ayde and helpe of God’.33 Foxe makes his martyrs’ dependence on God for help – including among the most celebrated of his educated ones – explicit in his description of the terror experienced by Lawrence Saunders upon Mary’s accession to the throne, which he contrasts to the prideful boasts of another minister, Dr Pendleton, who, when brought to the test, became apostata: And to the intent to give the reader to understand the better, what the grace of Christ worketh in his servauntes: and agayne, how feeble and weake man is of him selfe without this grace geven from above, though he seeme otherwise never so stoute in him selfe: here therefore have we added to the foresayd story of Laurence Saunders, the communication which in the begynnyng of his trouble, was betwene hym and D. Pendleton, by the example wherof, such as stand, may learne to understand to take heede with due feare, and not to bragge: to leane to the grace of the Lorde, and not to presume in themselves. Foxe guides his reader with a shoulder-note: ‘Strength to stand in Christ, cometh not of our selves, but it is the gift of God.’ In the end, Saunders was burned with green, slow-burning wood, ‘which put him to much more payne, but that the grace and most plentifull consolation of Christ, which never forsaketh his servauntes, & gave strength to S. Laurence, gave also patience to this Laurence, above all that hys tormentes could worke agaynst’.34 Like Saunders, feeling the loss of God’s consolation and fearing his imminent execution, Robert Glover, another of Foxe’s more prominent martyrs (he was a Cambridge Master of Arts and a member of a landed gentry family), shares his despair with his friend Augustine Behrer, who assures him that God will visit him


when the time comes. Sure enough, on the way to his execution, Glover ‘sodenly … was so mightely replenished with Gods holy comfort & heavenly joyes, that he cryed out clappyng handes to Austen, and saying in these wordes: Austen, he is come, he is come, &c., and that with such joy and alacritie’.35 Throughout the Acts and Monuments, God is seen using the weak to confound the mighty, but he is also seen to help all his martyrs when they need it, as they all do, rich and poor, educated and simple, male and female. Unlike the Eusebian virgins determined to experience torture and a gruesome death, the Marian martyrs do not want to die: they do not seek death in the manner of their ancient cousins; they fear the fire when faced with it; and their sometimes slow deaths by burning are painful. 36 In death, and as vessels for God’s grace, the martyrs are equals and equally dependent upon the grace that fills them. If equal in death, however, Foxe’s martyrs were not equals in life: as living members of an earthly community, they were male and female, rich and poor, powerful and ‘silly’. As well as writing his martyrs as evidence of papist cruelty, as members of the elect and as proof of the approach of the Last Days, Foxe was also writing them, according to modern scholarly consensus, as prototypes of the English, godly community; in this, they were models for behaviour in daily life, according to station, sex and faith, rather than models of fortitude in the face of persecution. Yet it remains troubling that he described so many of his female martyrs as women whom he and his reforming colleagues would not have wanted as wives, a problem not reconciled by recognition of the Eusebian strength-in-weakness paradigm. Over the last 30 years, a small number of scholars have attempted to solve this problem, with varying success, but in general opinion remains that his women martyrs were intended to serve as models for virtuous female behaviour, and certainly not to undermine the foundation of patriarchal authority, domestic or public: female subordination.37 Foxe was certainly aware of the potential propagandistic benefit of portraying his women martyrs as models of female virtue. While published in 1604, almost 20 years after Foxe’s death, the Jesuit Robert Parsons’ diatribe against Askew, for example – a direct rebuttal of Foxe’s inclusion of her in his Calendar of Martyrs – is the reaction he would have expected to her and to others’ stories:38 damned by her immodest combination of wit and independence, the female martyr is shown by Parsons inverting the social order, and thus sexual incontinence is assumed. Describing the burning of her three male


companions at the stake, Parsons introduces Askew, singling her out for criticism: But the Captayne of all was a yong woman of some 24. or 25. yeres old, named Anne Askue. Who havinge left the company of her husband John Kime, a gentleman of Lincolneshire, did follow the liberty of the new ghospell, goinge up and downe at her pleasure, to make new ghospellers and proselits of her Religion.39 Parsons’ disapproval of Askew’s ‘liberty’ – a liberty allowing for women ‘goinge up and downe’ at their pleasure – is immediately evident. However, he grows more explicit. Having pointed out her recantation and argued that Henry VIII ordered her torture in order to gain information about Catherine Parr’s faith (Parsons is convinced that had Henry lived he would have burned his queen), he expostulates against Askew: And this is the story of Anne Askue, whome Iohn Bale describeth in these wanton words. Anna Ascua, praeclari generis juvencula, eleganti forma atque ingenio praedita, &c. Anne Askue, a yong wench of a worshipfull house, and of elegant bewty and rare witt, &c. … And for that Bale calleth Anne Askue, Iuuvencula, a yong heaffer or steere that abideth no yoke: he seemeth not to be farre amisse. For that she was a coy dame, and of very evill fame for wantonnesse: in that she left the company of her husband, Maister Kyme, to gad up & and downe the countrey a ghospelling & ghossipinge where she might, & and ought not … And for so much as Io. Bale so highly commendeth her bewty and youth, affirming besides, that she was but 25. yeares of age, when she was putt to death, yt is easily seene, what may be suspected of her lyfe, and that the mysticall speeches and demaunds, which herselfe relateth in Foxe to have byn used to her by the King’s Councell, aboute the leavinge of her husband, were grounded in somwhat. Especially, seing that she seemed in a sort to disdayne the bearing of his name, calling herselfe Anne Askue alias Kime … By all which, and by the publike opinion and fame, that was of her lightnesse & liberty in that behalfe: every man may ghesse what a Iuuvencula she was & how fitt for Bales pen, & for Fox his Calendar. And the proud & presumptuous answers, quips, and nips, which she have both in matter of Religion, & otherwise, to the Kings Councell, and Bishops, when they examined her, and dealt with her seriously for her amendment: do well shew her intollerable arrogancy.40


Unlike in his discussion of Askew’s fellow martyr and friend John Lascelles, which follows this passage, Parsons does not address the details of Askew’s heresy. Her crime, in his estimation, was her independent movement and her ‘presumptuous’ discourse. As she left her husband and used her maiden name – as she indeed ‘abideth no yoke’ – she must have been wanton. Her lone status is extrapolated into whorishness, as is her wit. Foxe was aware of the potential for such criticism as this; Parsons was not the first Catholic polemicist to suggest that Protestant women were disobedient to their husbands, or even promiscuous. Prior to publication of the Acts and Monuments, John Christopherson (d. 1558), Queen Mary’s confessor and Bishop of Chichester, had warned in 1554 of the dangers of Protestantism to household order caused by the subversive boldness of female converts to the new faith: Thus did mens wyves to, that were become systers of the new fraternitye, order their husbandes. For where as the husbande dyd not favoure their secte, then would the wife no longer go to schole with hym in silence, as Saynt Paule byddeth her, but would boldlye fall to teache hym, and tell hym of his duety. And many of them were offended with Saynte Paule, that hadde commaunded them, that they shuld holde their peace in the churches. For gladly would they have preached, if they might have bene suffred, as some of them nevertheless did in corners. 41 Miles Huggarde, the Catholic poet and controversialist, had also attacked Protestant women, and specifically female martyrs, even more vehemently in another book released during Mary’s reign, The Displaying of the Protestantes. 42 Comparing her to the Melchiorite Anabaptist Joan Bocher, executed during Edward VI’s reign in 1550, Huggarde chastises Askew for her sharp tongue, and especially her behaviour when offered a pardon: ‘She defied them all, reviling the offerers thereof, with suche opprobrious names, that are not worthy rehersall, making the like signes too [sic] the preacher at her death, as her pue fellowe and sister in Christ, Joane Butcher did.’ 43 Huggarde contrasts Askew, to her detriment, to St Paul and St Steven, arguing that the appropriate behaviour for true martyrs facing death is quiet resignation. In this, his criticism does not appear to be aimed specifically at female martyrs. However, it is notable that Huggarde compares Askew to Boucher, which implies that his distaste for her speech and behaviour is compounded by the fact of her gender: while all martyrs should


demonstrate ‘modestie, pacience, charitie, and love’ in facing their deaths, women have a special responsibility to do so, as these are also the virtues with which they should be imbued throughout their lives. Huggarde’s attack becomes more targeted later in The Displaying, in a lengthy diatribe against evangelical women – especially female martyrs – for what he argues is their inevitable (if married) marital disobedience and promiscuity. He begins his assault in the context of defending Catholic clerical celibacy, or rather condemning the marriages of Protestant clerics. Their wives, he suggests, ‘were such for the most part, that either they were kept of other before, or els as common as the cartway, & so bound them to incestuous lecherye, whiche wemen are led with divers lustes, ever learning & never able to attaine unto the truth’. Like other Protestant women, the wives of Protestant priests are promiscuous, which failing is linked, by Huggarde, to an inability to understand religious truth, despite constant learning. In fact, the very act of ‘constant learning’ is bound to the sexual incontinence of women: they are ‘led with divers lustes, ever learning’. Huggarde repeats this connection, becoming more explicit: ‘Were not the sayd wemen ever lerning, & never able to come to the knowlege of the truth, beyng led with divers lustes, using their bodies with other men as well as with their supposed husbandes?’44 Like women who followed ancient heretics, the ‘simpering gosseppes and parottes … lyke the wanderyng gyllottes’ cover their evil lives ‘under color of sticking to the gospell’. This is evidenced by the fact that they – ‘by saint Mary’ – ‘are contented to runne from their husbandes into Germanie, the dongion of heretickes’, exile evidently providing ‘a meete cover for such cuppes’. 45 Huggarde offers ancient examples of heretical thinkers ‘assisted’ by their whores, comparing them to the recently executed Thomas Cranmer and implying that he had enjoyed a similar relationship with Joan Bocher.46 Listing a litany of sexually predatory historical women who had brought about the demise of otherwise good men, Huggarde reminds his reader that it is not all women of whom he writes – not ‘matrones, whiche are modest & sobre, obedient to their husbandes, contented to applie their myndes to the governement of housholde matters, and to bryng up their children in a goodly ordre’ – but rather of ‘suche onely whiche are curious in all matters, especially of that, wherof they have nothing to do’.47 This includes religion, but the motives of these ‘London ladies & other the lyke’ are not always religious: their ‘scripture mouthes are ready to allure their husbandes to dye in the lordes veritie, because they would fayne have new’ – new husbands, not new


religion.48 However, Huggarde regards as no better than these manipulative women (living Protestant women) those who end their lives in martyrdom. The decision to die is, in effect, the worse sort of marital disobedience: O wicked doughters of heresie, and dames of the devil himselfe. Is this your profession at your mariage daye, to bee at commaundement to your husbandes? And manye of you contrarye to their wylles maintayne your obstinacie by death. You ought, beynge Christians, and traded up in Christes fayth, rather to spend your lives for the defence of your chastitie, and the lives of your deare husbandes, then in the cause of heresie, the cause of your confusion.49 Rather than for points of doctrine, good women offer their lives for their children, their husbands and, like the infamous Lucretia, their chastity.50 The decision to die for heresy, on the other hand, is doubly criminal for a woman, for she who does this is not just a heretic, she is also a disloyal, disobedient wife, and a woman who studies religion, which she should not. The female heretic’s violation is more than merely spiritual, it is also social in a way that a man’s cannot be. Foxe’s own descriptions of women martyrs were first attacked by Nicholas Harpsfield51 in a Latin work written from his Elizabethan prison and published three years after the Acts and Monuments’ first edition. The sixth book of Harpsfield’s work, the Dialogi Sex, is devoted exclusively to attacking Foxe and ‘your extraordinary spider web of pseudomartyrs’ (egregiam istam Pseudomartyrii tui telam), including a diatribe against what he calls ‘a seditious book against the controlling of women advanced by the evangelical sect’.52 Foxe’s women martyrs are unnatural, immoral and disruptive. Unlike the ‘true and pure’ (verae ac purae) Mary, who vanquishes religion’s enemies with her purity, Protestantism, as Foxe’s work proves, creates chaos, ‘because the women against divine law are made to command’.53 If this were not so destructive, Harpsfield sneers, it would be amusing: ‘But it is wonderful to see the preposterous account, and prudent inversion of your Foxe.’54 The role Foxe allows women is an inversion of divine order, the Acts and Monuments subversive in its promotion of female liberation. Foxe was unconvinced by such polemic, and he portrayed his female martyrs in successive editions of the Acts and Monuments such that criticism like Harpsfield and Huggarde’s was inevitable. His freedom of portrayal must have been a deliberate choice, as he cannot have been unconscious of the vitriol that it would inspire. There is necessarily a


degree of speculation in any suggestion about the motives underlying this aspect of his methodological decision-making, but John Bale, at least as regards one female martyr, pre-empted Foxe’s choice: both the Askew story and the Examinations were well known in England and abroad when Foxe began production of the Rerum, and then the first English Acts and Monuments (1563). Askew was already notorious, had already been made famous via Bale’s martyrology and her own personal notoriety, and had already, as noted above, been reviled in print for unseemly behaviour. This fact, the phenomenon of Askew and her popularity, must have been viewed by Foxe with ambivalence. Askew could not be marginalized, and yet she was a difficult female icon. Problematic in the extreme, under Foxe’s pen she ultimately became not just a model martyr, but also a model disorderly female Protestant heroine. Despite heavy intervention in some parts of the Askew story as it came to him, Foxe does not attempt to explain her disorderly behaviour, her separation from her husband or her pursuit of a divorce: unlike in his treatment of her very problematic recantation, he does not attempt to reconcile her pursuit of a divorce to her martyr status. While Bale addresses the cause of Askew’s marital breakdown in his elucidation of the Lattre Examination, guaranteeing his readers that she was a good wife and justifying her pursuit of a divorce, 55 Foxe leaves the reference to her husband intact in the Lattre Examination, but does not attempt to explain her situation. As described above, Freeman argues that his goal in this, his ‘refusal’ to comment on the more scurrilous details of Askew’s private life, was to draw attention away from them. 56 However, he could have done more, but did not: he could have omitted the Privy Council’s question about Kyme. He could also – in the spirit of enhancing his story-telling with witness testimony – have taken advantage of an opportunity prior to the publication of the third edition of the Acts and Monuments to demonstrate Askew’s virtuous manner of living, even given her separation from her husband, as he was told in a letter from one of his correspondents, John Louth, that her godly lifestyle prior to her first arrest had impressed even a Catholic spy: Thys good gentlewoman Anne Askewgh … was lodged before hur imprisonement at an howse over-agaynst the Temple. And one great papiste of Wykam colleadge,57 then called Wadloe, a coursytore of the Chawncery, hott in his religione, and thynkyng not well of hir lyffe, gott hymselfe lodged harde by hur at the nexte howse, for


what purpose I neade not open to the wyse reader; but the conclusion was that, wheare he came to speake evyll of hur, he gave her the prayse to mr. Lyonell Trockmorton for the devouteste and godliest woman that ever he knew, ‘for (sayd he) at mydnyght she begynneth to pray, and cessyth not in many howers after, when I and others applye owr sleape or do worse’.58 Faced during exile, and upon his return to England, with beginning and then continuing the task of writing the stories of the Tudor martyrs, Foxe was immediately presented with the problem of Askew, a woman he could not write as a model of virtuous womanhood, because she was already written as disorderly. Not only could he not have hidden her problematic behaviour, he must have seen that it was unnecessary to do so. Askew, in all her independent glory, was already celebrated; thus Foxe wrote her as she already was. Whether or not he hoped unrealistically that her troubled marriage would escape the notice of his critics, in his portrayal of the women martyrs following her, he drew attention to their similar problems. Foxe portrayed his Marian women martyrs in ways that made them easy targets for sexual insult and innuendo. However, in doing so he seems to have attempted to undermine or deflect future criticism by showing their persecutors revealing, to their detriment, their misogynistic assumptions about women’s learning and erudition, making them appear ridiculous. One of the more poignant examples of this strategy occurs in his description of the arrest of Rose Allin, a young woman captured by the notorious heretic hunter Edmund Tyrrell, while nursing her sickly mother. As Allin fetches water for her mother she is intercepted by Tyrrell, who presses her to encourage her parents to reform their faith. Her response reveals her revulsion for Catholicism and her own evangelical stance. Told that, like her parents, she will burn, she responds in typical fashion: ‘for my Christes sake, if so I be compelled, & I hope in his mercies, if he call me to it, he will enhable me to beare it’. Foxe describes Tyrrell reacting with both cruelty and absurdity: Then that cruell Tirrill taking the candell from her, held her wriest, and the burning candell under her hand, burning crosse wise over the backe thereof, so long till the very sinnowes crackt asunder … In which tyme of his tyranny, he said often to her: why whore, wilt thou not cry? Thou young whore, wilt thou not cry? &c. Unto which alwayes she aunswered, that she had no cause, she thanked God,


but rather to rejoyce. He had, she said, more cause to weepe then she, if he considered the matter well. In the end, when the sinnowes (as I sayd) brake that all the house heard them, he then thrust her from him violently, and sayd: baa strong whore, thou shameless beast, thou beastly whore. &c. with such lyke vile wordes.59 The image of Tyrrell’s villainy is made sexually obscene by his language, his physical cruelty exacerbated by his verbal attack. Tyrrell’s accusation of whoredom can only be read as ridiculous, since his emotional outburst is shown in such sharp relief to Allin’s self-control. Allin was arrested and she and her parents burned to death along with seven other Protestants. In Foxe’s story of Allin’s arrest and torture, frustrated in the face of female strength and defiance, her persecutor resorts to accusations of sexual misconduct, rationalizing his victim’s behaviour by recategorizing her as sexually deviant. This strategy exemplifies the association made between female disorderliness – disobedience, assertiveness, eloquence, erudition, independence – and sexual lasciviousness dominating discussion of and anxiety expressed about gender in early modern discourse, but this example exists only in the text of the Acts and Monuments, Foxe telling his reader that he heard of it from a fellow prisoner of Allin’s.60 Presumably, in the absence of manuscript evidence, it is through this channel that Allin’s story came to Foxe, but in putting Tyrrell’s words into print, he must have been conscious of the spectacular and absurd nature of Tyrrell’s sexualized aggression. There is also no manuscript evidence extant for Foxe’s detailed transcription of the examinations of Elizabeth Young, a smuggler of Protestant books interrogated thirteen times in 1558.61 The sexualized language and abuse used by her questioners – high-ranking churchmen and educated men of law – dominates the narrative of her interrogations. Foxe portrays Young as erudite, verbose and even sarcastic. She is patronizing and contemptuous of her interrogators from the beginning of her examinations, responding to questions about her birth and parentage: ‘Syr, all this is but vayne talke, and very superfluous … Ye have not … put me in prison to know who is my father and mother.’62 When threatened with torture to make her reveal the names of her associates, Young expresses a typical willingness to suffer for her faith,63 and in response to her erudition and courage she is repeatedly called a whore, variously a ‘rebell whore and traytourly hereticke’, a ‘traytourly whore and hereticke’, a ‘rebell and traytourly whore’, a ‘vyle traitorly whore and hereticke’, etc., which threats and insults continue


through several sessions of questioning. Brought before Bishop Bonner and others for one of her sessions, Young’s erudition prompts Sir Roger Cholmley to exclaim: ‘xx. pound it is a man in a womans clothes: xx. pound it is a man’, after which she is threatened with a physical examination.64 When Young admits to her belief about the Lord’s Supper – ‘when I do receave this Sacrament in faith and in spirite, I do receive Christ’ – Cholmley responds: ‘Ah whore? Spirite and fayth whore?’65 During one of her examinations, Bonner’s chancellor returns again to the issue of Young’s sex, attempting to manipulate rather than to malign her, by appealing to her sense of propriety regarding appropriate behaviour for women: ‘Why, thou art a woman of fayre yeares: what shouldest thou medle with y Scriptures? It is necessary for thee to beleve, and that is inough. It is more fit for thee to medle with thy distaffe, then to medle with the Scriptures.’ Debate between Young and the Chancellor intensifies during this examination until he becomes more aggressive, remaining unable to respond to her erudition without reference to her gender: ‘So me thinketh: thou wilt take upon thee to teach me … Why, ye will not be ashamed to flie unto the highest mystery even to the Sacrament, at the first dash, and ye are not afeard to argue with the best Doctour in the land.’ 66 He eventually descends into the sort of sexual innuendo used earlier by his colleagues: ‘What priest hast thou layne withall, that thou has so much scripture? Thou art some Priestes woman I think? for thou wilt take upon thee to reason and teach the best doctor in all the land, thou.’67 Foxe shows Young to be of higher intelligence and erudition than her persecutors; they, on the other hand, show themselves in his text as not just wrong-headed in their faith, but also absurd in their misogyny, not just in their sexual innuendo, but also in their insistence on the impropriety of female erudition. The repeated accusations against Young of whoredom; the charge in the face of her erudition of transvestitism; the resort to maligning her as a priest’s mistress: these all increase the spectacular value of her persecution, exposing them as ridiculous. As in Allin’s case it is impossible to discover to what extent Foxe’s retelling of the Young examinations resembles reality, however it is perhaps significant that her story did not appear in the Acts and Monuments until its second edition. One response to the success of the first edition was its author’s inundation with stories from witnesses of persecution, and it is possible that Young’s story did not reach Foxe until after its publication. However, given the response of his critics to the first edition, Foxe must have realized the value of posing the sort challenge to female strength and erudition dominating the Young


examinations, just to have it shown up as misplaced, in the process allowing his subject’s persecutors to humiliate themselves, within his text, with their own sexualized attacks. Young is called a whore no fewer than thirteen times in her examinations, thus pointedly showing that misplaced accusations of whoredom unfairly followed godly women on their journeys to martyrdom. Unlike Rose Allin, whose courage under torture elicits Tyrrell’s obscenity, Young engages in a long theological argument with her interrogators, something offensive in a society placing moral value on female silence. Without exception, Foxe rejects for his female martyrs the model of silent and even modest womanhood, allowing them to show, like Young – who managed to avoid execution – contempt for male figures of authority, always their interrogators, sometimes their husbands. Under his pen, the martyr Alice (also known as Elizabeth or Margaret) Dryver, for example, overcomes her interrogators in verbal combat, silencing and humiliating them, with Foxe cheering her on from the margins surrounding the text of her examinations. Despite having had her ears cut off for calling Queen Mary Jezebel,68 Dryver is described engaging in long and complex debate with her male interrogators, Dr Spencer, chancellor to the Bishop of Norwich, and his assistant, Dr Gascoyne. Her contempt for them is obvious. She repeatedly calls them fools, for example, silencing a priest with utter contempt: ‘Why priest, I come not to talke with thee, but … with thy maister: but if thou wilt, I shal talke with the. Commaund thy master to hold his peace.’ (Foxe comments gleefully, ‘the priest put his nose in his cappe, and spake never a woord more’.)69 In argument concerning the Mass, Dryver shames Gascoyne: ‘Such a doctor, such doctrin … I marvell ye blushe not before all this people, to lie so manifestly as ye do’; and Foxe chimes in, ‘With that Gascoin held hys peace, & made her no answer. For as it semed, he was ashamed of hys doinges.’ When Dryver is taken away, ‘(sayd she) ye be not able to resist the truth, ye commaund me to prison agayne’.70 In a climactic moment during Dryver’s second interview, she derides Gascoyne for failing to carry a New Testament: ‘I thought so much in ded, that ye were little acquainted with al. Surely you be a good doctor. You saye you sit here to judge according to the lawe, and how can you give true judgment, and have not the booke of the lawe with you?’ Having noted that he must be as good a doctor as she, since she also has no testament, Gascoyne suffers her retort: Well syr, I had one, but you toke it from me (as you would take me from Christ if you could) and since would ye not suffer me to have


any booke at all: so burning is your Charity. But you maye wel know (I thanke God) that I have exercised the same. Els could I not have answered you (to gods glory be it spoken) as I have.71 Foxe continues to celebrate Dryver’s verbal victory: ‘Thus’, he narrates, ‘she put them al to silence, that one loked on another, and had not a word to speake’, cheering in a shoulder-note, ‘the papistes put to silence by a simple woman’.72 Foxe’s Dryver lives the promise of Luke 21, speaking words to her captors that they cannot challenge, overcoming them verbally and mocking their silence. However, this is not simply because she is imbued with the Holy Spirit; as she (and thus Foxe) makes explicit, it is because she has ‘exercised’ the New Testament. Unlike Allin, Askew and Young, Dryver is not subjected during her interrogation to innuendo about her sexual morality. This connection, however – the response that Foxe would have expected – was supplied by Parsons, whose response to Foxe’s celebration of Dryver exemplifies the linking of female erudition, speech and promiscuity. Drawing on her friendship with Alexander Gouch, with whom she was both arrested and executed, Parsons begins his attack on Dryver, as in his reaction to the Askew story, by noting an inversion of natural order: two Foxian martyrs, he reports, were burned at Ipswich in 1558, ‘to witt, Alexander Gouch, and Alice Dryver, or rather Alice Dryver and Alexander Gouch, for that the woman was the doctor of the man’. Following from and worse than this, the man (‘yow must note’) ‘was not her husband, but a craftsman dwelling not farre from her … who using to her house … was instructed by her in the new ghospell’. Gouch and Dryver were found together (as Foxe admits) in a haystack: ‘no fitt place for such a coople to be conversant together’. Although the woman was married, Parsons points out, ‘no mention at all of her husband, but only of this suspitious takinge of them together in the forsaid Haygulfe, wherby a man may easily ghesse, how light a ghospellinge sister she was’. Parsons pointedly inserts a shoulder-note – ‘Alice Driver a famous doctrix’ – and adds: ‘yet doth Fox make such accompt of her, and of her rare learninge in the scriptures, as of no one sister more in all his history’.73 In his words on Dryver, Parsons once again undermines the credibility of Foxe’s female martyr by accusing her of promiscuity. She, like Askew, inverts the gender order and is seen to be out from under the authority of her husband, who is known to exist but whose absence from the story is highlighted. Parsons first implies and then


establishes the martyr’s sexual guilt, building a base upon which to rest the issue of her erudition – or rather, arrogance. He doubts the veracity of Foxe’s account of Dryver’s silencing of Dr Spencer and Dr Gascoyne, rather supposing that the arguments attributed to her are actually Foxe’s: For no man of wisdome will imagine (I weene) that Alice Driver, though she were never so prachant & forward in heresie, and bold through the pride therof, could make such a conference of her selfe, with such learned men as the aforenamed were, especially yf yt be true, that she had lost her eares first for her intemperate speech; yet was her bragg of havinge read the Bible throughout, fitt for a woman of her trade.74 Only a woman of Dryver’s trade – that plied in the haystack – would boast of her own learning. Foxe admits that Dryver was found in a haystack with Gouch, but he does not comment further on that aspect of her arrest. There are no existing records of Dryver’s actual interrogations, but she is listed as one of a number of heretics described as guilty of detestabile herresis et impio heretice primitate … et execrabile dogmate comprehensos in a copy of a letter from the Bury Assizes extant among Foxe’s British Library papers. 75 Interestingly, the name John Dryver, probably her husband, also appears at the beginning of this document as one of the listed heretics; however, it disappears from the communication after its first mention, to be replaced by the name Alexander Gouch.76 Perhaps Gouch, in the first instance at Assizes, claimed John Dryver’s name in an attempt to explain his presence with the other man’s wife in a haystack. It is not unreasonable to suppose, from the information available – that Dryver and Gouch were found together in a haystack, and that Gouch was apparently mistaken for her husband – that the two were involved in an adulterous relationship. Even if they were not, this deduction was inevitably going to be made by Foxe’s critics. Women like Askew, Dryver and Young are portrayed as learned and eloquent in the Acts and Monuments. In this their voices – like those of many of Foxe’s female martyrs – are equal to those of their male counterparts. Askew and Dryver also, however, famously behaved in ways that made them vulnerable to more explicit moral criticism, but Foxe rejected an apologetic or editorial strategy – certainly in Dryer’s case – designed to protect them from posthumous moral infamy. This was a risky choice, and it provided ammunition to his detractors.


Other of his female martyrs, however, of much less prominence than Askew or Dryver, were also targeted for criticism, their offences their speech and manner of approaching death. For Parsons these women were guilty of immodesty, extrapolated from arrogance and/or insolence. Elizabeth Folkes, for example, the youngest (and most verbose) of a group of six martyrs, is criticized for (quite symbolically) flinging her petticoat into the crowd as she approached her execution, crying ‘farewell, all the world, farewell Fayth, farewell hope: … welcome love’. 77 Parsons remarks sarcastically: ‘and this is proper also to heresie, that the yongest and weakest will presume most, especially in woman kynde … Thus relateth Foxe of his modest mayd.’78 Similarly, Rose Allin of the burnt hand, another ‘malepart yonge mayden’, described by Foxe as the most vocal of four other martyrs, is condemned by Parsons in a shoulder-note to the Three Conversions: ‘The immodest and insolent answers of Rose Allen Foxe his maid’.79 The words of Foxe’s female martyrs – sometimes overshadowing male voices – maintain their strength even in stories in which husbands and wives face trouble together. When this happens Foxe does not hesitate to show women stronger or more erudite than their husbands. One searches in vain for stories in which the opposite is the case. When Joan and William Dangerfield were imprisoned in 1556, shortly after Joan had given birth, the Bishop of Gloucester, begynneth to practise not with the woman first, as the Serpent did with Eve, but with the man, craftely deceivyng his simplicitie, with fayre glosing wordes, falsely persuadyng him that his wife had recanted: and asking him, wherfore he should more stand in his owne conceate, then she, beyng as well learned as he, and so subtilly drew out a forme of recantation, wherwith he deceived the simple soule. Wherunto after that he had once graunted that he would consent, although he had not yet recanted, they suffered him to go to his wife, where she lay in the common Jayle.80 When William revealed what he had agreed to, Joan, ‘her hart clave asunder’, chastised him: ‘Alacke, thus long have we continued one, and hath Sathan so prevailed, to cause you to breake your first vow made to Christ in Baptism.’ For recanting, William was released, seems to have botched a suicide attempt and died at home. His wife and child died in prison. Parsons again disapproves of such portrayal, singling out for criticism the story of Margery and James Austoo. According to Foxe, these


two, when examined by Bonner, ‘answered as truly (God been therefore praysed) as ever did any’. He continues: ‘especially the woman, to who the Lord had geven the greater knowledge & more ferventness of spirit’.81 Parsons’ response is bitter: Margery Austow, who called before the Bishop togethear with her husband, as she had byn his teacher and preacher at home; so would she also needs be his speaker in that place, which Fox in like manner signifieth … yow may perceave how the world went, and that the gray mare was the better horse, which doth well appeare also by her answers, they being most arrogant and insolent, as other such franticke weomen had used before, and so not worth the repeatinge. 82 He attaches a shoulder-note: ‘Margery Austow her husbands Maister in ghospellinge’. Parsons detects within the evangelical movement a dangerous trend, evidence for which he locates in Foxe: the disruption of natural, necessarily gendered order. In his rebuttal of Foxe’s martyrology he repeatedly refers to the female martyrs – as he does not the men – as insolent, presumptuous, arrogant and impudent. He does not consider the substance of their heresies worth review; his concern is their disorderly behaviour.83 For these women are disorderly – on one level their very martyrdoms demonstrate this to be the case, as they necessarily break the law and defy authority. This, however, is not the problem for Parsons; rather, he objects to Foxe’s celebration of their impudent and immodest unwomanly behaviour: ‘John Fox delighteth every where in the malepart aunwers of his yonge maydens’; ‘Thus relateth Foxe of his modest mayd’; So wryteth Fox … that this her immodest aunswere … was by the motion of the spirit of God’; ‘be noted the fond malice of Foxe, approving the arrogancy and contumelious speech of this woman’.84 Nevertheless, Parsons’ most effective weapon against Foxe’s female martyrs is not their impudence in itself, but the ease with which they could be accused of promiscuity. As in his predecessor Huggarde’s work, in Parsons’ view a woman proved insolent or studious was a woman proved immodest and thus sexually disorderly. More damaging still, Foxe exacerbated the potential for such accusations of promiscuity by failing to hide – and even celebrating – the disastrous tendency of some of his women martyrs to disobey or even, like Askew, to abandon their husbands. He shows several women martyrs defying


their husbands in the Acts and Monuments in stories whose poignancy would remain intact without the details of their marital disobedience, and whose value as propaganda, given concerns over marital propriety and the inevitable reaction of Catholic polemicists, would have increased without them. Protestant concern over the charge that its ministry encouraged wives to disobey their husbands was surely not mitigated by Foxe’s description of the martyr Joyce Lewes, for example, whose relationship with the evangelical John Glover (older brother of the martyr Robert Glover) completely undermined the authority of her husband, Thomas. Having heard about the execution of Lawrence Saunders, Lewes sought instruction in religion from Glover, who became her teacher, clearly supplanting Thomas Lewes’s role in his wife’s life.85 Lewes, according to Foxe, ‘did often times resort to’ Glover’s house, which alone was scandalous behaviour. As Glover’s tutelage continued, Lewes became determined to ‘flie from those things the which did displease the lord her god’, so when compelled by the ‘furiousnes of her husband, to come back to the church’, she turned her back on the holy water, getting herself summoned before the bishop. Thomas Lewes paid a substantial surety of £100 for his wife’s release on condition that she reform herself within a month, but at this point Glover’s intervention completely undermines his ability to make her do so. Lewes ‘resorts continually’ to Glover, who continues his instruction. Glover attempts to convince his pupil’s husband to find a way to save his wife, ‘to be content to forfet so much money … or forfet anye thinge for her sake’, but Thomas Lewes, ‘so lyke a murtherer of his own wife caried her to the bloudy bishope’. Lewes was examined, imprisoned, condemned as a heretic and burned.86 The story of Lewes’s disobedience towards her husband is not unique, and it is clear that Foxe rejected any agenda of forcing his female heroines into a mould of obedient wifehood. Sometimes, in fact, his stories of wifely disobedience ended well for both wife and husband, as in the case of the Foxe family (not the author’s family) of Stoke, Suffolk, whose entire congregation refused to attend Mass during Mary’s reign, with two exceptions, both men. While one of the communicants (John Steyr) allowed his wife to make her own decision, the other, John Foxe, attempted, with threat of divorce, to force his wife to communicate. When he conspired with the curate to force his wife to take the Sacrament, Elizabeth Foxe fled their home, taking refuge with their fellow parishioners. Her persistent defiance was rewarded when he finally reformed his faith: his wife’s disobedience


made of him, according to Foxe (the narrator), ‘a farre other man then he was before’. The happy couple – now excommunicate – escaped arrest and martyrdom by fleeing the town.87 Extraordinarily, it was only through Elizabeth Foxe’s disobedience that her husband found his salvation. More often, however, disobedient wives ended their lives at the stake. Like Lewes and Foxe, Alice Benden of Canterbury was put under enormous pressure by her husband, who ‘willed her to goe to the church’, which she ‘both then and els when refused to do’. Much to Foxe’s outrage, her husband (like Lewes’s) threatened to return her to prison himself, but Benden spared him that infamy and turned herself in.88 Parsons justifies Benden’s husband’s hostility, in the process questioning the martyr’s sexual morality. According to Foxe, as she approached the stake, Benden threw her handkerchief to ‘one John Banks’, asking that he keep it as a remembrance of her. This, to Parsons, had serious implications: ‘Which yet Fox will not deny (I thinke) but that yt had byn more decent for a wife, to have sent & given to her owne husband … perhaps her husband was not desirous to keep any relique of her.’ He laments, ‘this was the spirit of ghospellinge systers in those dayes’.89 Corrupted, like Askew, by the ‘liberty of the new ghospell’, Benden was adulterate. Her husband did not betray her; she, in the spirit of a ‘ghospellinge syster’, betrayed him. To Parsons, the new gospel created disorderly women – whores – and Foxe’s stories of female martyrdom helped him to prove his point. There is only one female victim of the Marian persecution whose sexual reputation Foxe directly defends in the Acts and Monuments: Perotine Massey of Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The story of the Guernsey martyrs is notorious for its gruesomeness. Catherine Cauches and her two adult daughters, Perotine Massey and Guillaume Gilbert, are arrested for possessing stolen property, and in the process of investigation it is revealed that they do not attend church. They plead ignorance, promising to conform and obey the law henceforth, but they are nevertheless, and illegally, executed. Massey is heavily pregnant at the time of her death and her belly bursts in the fire. Her child, a living boy, falls to the ground; he is picked up, ‘handled’ and thrown back into the fire. Useful as a straightforward narrative of papist cruelty, the Guernsey story, in the first edition of the Acts and Monuments, is ambiguous in its description of the women involved due to the awkward fact (not hidden by Foxe) that they were willing – even desperate – to recant and accept Mary’s religious laws. Its tone changes, however, in the 1570


and subsequent editions, due to Foxe’s response to accusations against Massey made by the Catholic polemicist Thomas Harding, in 1567.90 Harding, in the context of a battle of books with James Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, sneering at Jewel’s lament at the death of Massey’s child, attributes to her at least three ‘heinous crimes … heresie, lecherie, and murther. And to these thefte may be added.’ The primary aim in his attack, however, is to prove Massey’s moral depravity, the illegitimacy of her baby. Why, he asks, does Foxe fail to identify the child’s father? He answers his own question: ‘It appeareth very credible, that the historiographer was a shamed to name the childes Father … For I would faine know who was the husband to the daughter. M. Fox doth not expresse it.’ 91 Not only is she wanton; Massey herself is guilty of the child’s murder as she could have saved him by claiming the ‘benefite of her belly’. Her failure to do so is proof of Harding’s primary charge against her, her whoredom: But the honest woman, because she would not shame the Gospel, keping it privy from the Magistrates, claimed not the benefite of the Lawe, and so now not only like an harlot or Heretique, but like a Murtherer went desperately to the fier, and murdered bothe her selfe, and her childe conceived within her … Judge now discrete Reader, to whom redoundeth the blame of the crime, whether to the Ministers of Justice … or to the woman, that for avoiding a worldly shame, conceeling her owne turpitude, became a murtherer of her owne babe, before it came to perfection.92 Foxe’s main tactic against Harding’s criticism is directly and at length to refute his suggestion that Massey was a whore and a murderer of her child. He names her husband (as well as the man who performed their marriage) 93 and argues that, unlike many lascivious Catholic nuns, Massey never laid a hand on her child, much less murdered him.94 Offering a number of suggestions as to why she was not spared the flames despite her condition, he begins the process of her sanctification: ‘what was the cause that moved her so willinglye to recant as shee did, but partly to save her owne life, and especially the poore innocent? Whereby it is manifest to be understanded, what a motherly affection she had to save her infant.’95 While in the 1563 edition of the Acts and Monuments Foxe had simply to tolerate the fact of the Guernsey women’s willingness to recant, Harding, by 1570, had provided him with a way to explain it (the trinity of Guernsey women are devolved, in the spectacle of Massey’s story, into one). Massey is


still imperfect, but the seriousness of her flaw is reduced from the cowardice of a potential apostate to the concern and resulting weakness of a worried mother. Prior, however, to defending Massey’s reputation, Foxe offers an explanation for his failure to identify her husband in the first instance. ‘As though’, he writes: historiographers beyng occupyed in settyng forth the persecution of Gods people suffering death for Religion and doctrine of Christ, wer bound or had nothyng els to do but to play the Sumner, and so bryng forth, who were husbandes to the wives and fathers to their children: which newfound law of history, beyng never required before, or observed of any story writers, if M. H. now shall exact of me, first let him begyn with him selfe, and shew us (as wise as he is) who was his own father, if he can. And yet I thinke not contrary, but his mother was an honest woman. And no lesse do I thinke also of this Perotine aforesaid.96 While Massey’s situation is certainly different from those of Askew, Lewes, Dryver and Benden (she is accused not of disobeying, abandoning or cheating on a husband, but of lacking one), Foxe insists in her case that he does not think it necessary to defend the sexual and/or marital status of a woman murdered for godly religion: those are martyrs, he insists, who suffer ‘neither for felony, murder, nor whoredome, but only for the religion in k. Edwardes time receaved’. Foxe left and even made his female martyrs vulnerable to attack by his critics. By failing to mould them into silent, chaste and obedient women, he presented as martyrs women whom neither he nor his contemporaries would have wanted as wives. Criticism was bound to follow such portrayal, and when it did its substance was predictable. Perotine Massey, however, is different in Foxe’s telling from his other problematic women: she was neither erudite nor verbose, but she was problematic as a martyr, because she was also not steadfast. Harding himself, ironically, in his attack against her, offered Foxe an opportunity to consolidate her status, to solve the problem of her willingness to conform her religious practice and at the same time articulate a broader principle, withdrawing from his critics the right to attack his martyrs on any issue other than the truth of the faith for which they died: when Harding ‘hath confuted that religion, I shall crosse her out of the booke & fellowship of Martyrs’.97 Foxe’s strategy in refuting Harding in his second edition was to show him up as absurd, his accusations inaccurate and, importantly,


irrelevant, but Harding is not the only Catholic misogynist mocked in the Acts and Monuments. Especially following criticism of the first English edition, Foxe wrote his problematic women’s stories such that their persecutors were shown, by their cruelty and obscenity, revealing the absurdity of their own misogynist prejudice. Not only does Elizabeth Young – of all the woman martyrs the one most subject to sexual innuendo and lascivious verbal attack – make her first appearance in the 1570 edition, Foxe also introduces at length in this edition the story of a woman only briefly described in the appendix of the first, Prest’s wife of Cornwall, executed in Exeter shortly before the death of Queen Mary. Like all the martyrs, Prest’s defining characteristic is her constancy, but she also shows remarkable erudition and suffers the indignity of witnessing sexual incontinence and of being accused of it herself. She is clearly disorderly, having left her husband to escape idolatry, and throughout her examinations she repeatedly refuses to return to him even to save her life.98 Prest is also disorderly in her combative ability to debate sacramental theology; despite illiteracy, she has learned God’s word by listening to sermons and by having the Bible read to her: ‘I have learned such thinges, as are so fixed in my brest, that death shall not separate them.’ Throughout her imprisonment in Exeter, before being turned over to the secular power for condemnation and execution, she is called a whore for her obstinacy and for her refusal to return to her husband, and most humiliatingly, she is interrogated by the Bishop of Exeter’s chancellor (Blackstone) in front of his concubine and her friends: the lasciviousness of the incontinent priest is artfully contrasted to the constancy of the martyr, particularly in light of the sexualized language used against her. Prest’s examination before the bishop begins with the issue of her sex, Bishop Troubleville’s first words reminiscent of those directed at Elizabeth Young by one of her examiners and of Huggarde’s condemnation of ‘curious’ women: ‘Thou foolish woman … I heare say thou has spoken certeine wordes of the most blessed Sacrament of the altar, the body of Christ. Fie for shame. Thou an unlearned person and a woman … It is not womans matters, at cardes and towe to be spoken of.’ Prest answers that she is hard-working and charitable, for which the bishop praises her, but adds, ‘Art thou not a mans wife?’ Foxe interrupts the dialogue at this point: ‘And here’, he says, ‘the Bishop entred into talke of her husband. To whom she aunswered agayne, declaring that she had a husband and children: and had them not.’ He then returns to Prest’s first-person voice: ‘But standing here as I do …


in the cause of Christ and his truth, where I must either forsake Christ, or my husband, I am contented to sticke onely to Christ … and renounce the other.’ Here, Foxe adds, Prest remembers Christ’s words: ‘He that leaveth not father or mother, sister or brother, husband. &c.’99 In bringing attention to Prest’s wifely disobedience and desertion, Foxe celebrates it, tagging his text with a shoulder-note: ‘The wife renouncing her husband for Christes sake’.100 Later in the dialogue, Troubleville bluntly articulates the opinion that inevitably derived from cases like this: ‘But how chaunceth it that thou wentest away from thy husband? If thou were an honest woman, thou wouldest not have left thine husband & children, and runne about the countrey like a fugitive.’101 Prest answers: ‘as my master christ counselleth me, when I was persecuted in one Citie I fled unto an other’; continuing: ‘I fled not for whoredome, nor for theft, but because I would be no partaker with him & his, of that foule Idoll the Mass.’102 Foxe, through Prest, acknowledges the implications of her disorderly behaviour and her marital abandonment, and offers scriptural justification for it – if the godly woman is persecuted ‘in one Citie’, she may go to another. After imprisonment, release, re-imprisonment and various tribulations, Prest is condemned and given over to the secular power, where she is sentenced to burn. When pressured in the face of condemnation once more to recant, she answers: ‘Nay, that will I not … God forbid that I should lose the lyfe eternall for this carnall and short lyfe. I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband: from the fellowship of Aungels to mortall children.’103 ‘As constant a woman in the faith of Christ, as ever was uppon the earth’, Prest goes cheerfully to her fiery death, ‘as though she had bene prepared for that day of her mariage to meete the Lambe’.104 Prest is a particularly exemplary figure in the Acts and Monuments. Alone of the female martyrs, she articulates the reason for her disobedience to and abandonment of her husband (‘as my master christ counselleth me, when I was persecuted in one Citie I fled unto an other’), but she does so in words devised by Foxe, who is cagey about his source of information for her story. Unlike in the cases of Young and Dryver, he does not even claim to have received transcripts of her examinations, but rather to have spoken with witnesses of them. Accounts of them exist neither in the Bishop of Exeter’s Register, nor in the Chancery Court records of the bishopric of Exeter.105 Foxe must have crafted her testimony, even if influenced by the memories – as many as twelve years old – of others. The lack of manuscript evidence, and Foxe’s own admission that he had none, makes his presentation of


this woman’s testimony especially revealing. The case of this poor farmer’s wife, among the final few of the Marian martyrs and appearing in detail for the first time in the 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, is disturbingly perfect. The female martyr is shown to be both socially deviant and spiritually constant. She alone of the martyrs articulates to her persecutors the cause of her defiance of social obligation, which she explains is her marital relationship with Christ, in the process identifying a justification for marital disobedience and abandonment, one explicitly supported by Foxe. While maintaining his refusal to apologize for a woman’s disorderly behaviour, he openly suggests in Prest’s testimony the reason for its acceptability, even desirability: her fidelity to her heavenly spouse. The concubinage of the adulterate Blackstone adds to the appearance of fidelity in the martyr: shown in sharp relief to priestly whoredom, the faithfulness of the woman martyr, to Christ if not to her husband, reconciles her disorderliness to her godly virtue: ‘I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband’, she says, approaching death ‘as though she had bene prepared for that day of her mariage to meete the Lambe’. Central to Prest’s fictional testimony is her belief that her duty to her heavenly husband supersedes her earthly concerns. This is a theme of great importance in the Acts and Monuments, one which I return to in Chapter 5. For the moment, however, her very presence and the explicitness with which her disorderliness is described and even celebrated prove Foxe’s willingness to expose his martyrs to gendered criticism – criticism shown up as misplaced within his narrative – and poses a challenge to the idea that he was embarrassed by Askew’s marital problems. In Prest, as in the multitude of stories about women subverting gendered restrictions, Foxe allowed their critics and their persecutors to make fools of themselves, in the process making irrelevant, at least as against his female elect, a traditional weapon against women.

5 Mrs Prest’s Heavenly Husband

When Foxe, through the testimony of Prest’s wife, articulates the reason for her abandonment of her husband, he does so using the language of heavenly marriage: Prest is married to Christ – not in martyrdom itself so much as in election – and thus she necessarily rejects the things of the world, including earthly authority – ecclesiastical, legal and marital. Persecuted in one city – her earthly marriage – she leaves it for another – heavenly marriage – in the process rejecting as well such mundane realities as carnality, flesh, human or feminine weakness and familial obligation. She describes the things she rejects through reference to their relationship to nature, flesh and the world. The husband she has abandoned is ‘earthly’, the life she has given up is ‘carnall’ and her children are ‘mortal’. Her wisdom seems foolishness to ‘carnall men of this world’. She, whose ‘one husband’ is already with her in ‘this Citie’, has been chosen by God, elected to a status of the spirit, transcending nature, above even gender – an earthly construct – and the social restraints that accompany it. For Foxe’s women martyrs to forsake the things of the world, including the traditional obligations of their sex, even disassociating themselves from their familial responsibilities, is to act in a positive manner, proving themselves members of the heavenly city, the invisible church, as brides of Christ. As brides of Christ, Foxe’s women martyrs take on the role and characteristics of Christ’s persecuted church, the New Jerusalem of Bale’s Image and Ecclesia of Foxe’s Christus Triumphans. Wholly self-abnegating for Christ’s sake, and wearing the scars of persecution for him as wedding jewels, as embodiments of his true, spiritual and female church they oppose the false, the Whore of Babylon, whose identity in turn is revealed by her twin carnal lusts, sex and blood. Foxe’s acceptance of Bale’s firmly gendered conception of the two churches is clear 103


in his apocalyptic play Christus Triumphans, but it also emerges in the Acts and Monuments. Like Bale he traces Antichrist’s appropriation of the papacy through its imposition of clerical celibacy on its clergy, at the same time expressing his certainty that the institution itself is and was ever inherently hypocritical – evil not in its violation, but in itself: avowed virginity is not excellent, even when kept. Foxe himself, as a young man, suffered materially for his own refusal to enter the celibate profession. He was a fellow of Magdalen College when the Act of the Six Articles passed through Parliament in 1539, an event that would come to seem of immense importance to him, in part because it reflected the shift in the Henrician mood that would effectively end his academic career. He believed himself forced out of Magdalen because of his inability to keep his fellowship without taking clerical orders, which was, in turn, due to his refusal to take the vow of celibacy, his determination fed by a strong aversion to the institution as well as by his personal wish to marry. His obstinacy very likely forced the college officials formally to confront the ‘heresy’ of one of their fellows. Magdalen’s president, Owen Oglethorpe, a religious conservative himself who accepted a bishopric under Mary, would not have been inclined to protect an obvious reformer within his college, especially in the prevailing religio-political climate. Given the college’s necessary self-interest and the fact that its Visitor was Stephen Gardiner, the arch-conservative Bishop of Winchester, it is small wonder that Foxe found himself friendless at Magdalen.1 In correspondence with friends, Foxe specifically identifies his refusal to take a vow of celibacy as the catalyst for his departure from Magdalen, referring to the vow in terms that suggest both desexing and sterilization: ‘but the other men in their prime’, he writes in one letter, ‘who must once have been like you in fertility, now are all as infertile women’.2 This criticism implies deep contempt for the vow of celibacy and its inevitable resulting childlessness. He defends his decision in similar terms to another friend who had attempted to convince him to take orders in order to retain his position at Magdalen: Not all that glitters is gems … you do not know, Hedley, what part of me the shoe pinches. All reasonable sides of this have been considered enough by me: nor can you judge it [my decision] to attend the rashness of a young boy. I have by no means rejected your counsel at any time. But not all wisdom [Minerva] is the same, nor all genius, nor all natures similar. And you perhaps are not able to measure my soul for me but by yours … I must pass by

Mrs Prest’s Heavenly Husband 105

[leave the college] before the feast of Michael [Michaelmas] arrives, by our statutes and our decretals, [as] it is not agreeable to me to be circumcized this year.3 Foxe reduces the possibility of taking orders to the problem of celibacy, specifically citing his refusal to be ‘circumcized’ (circumcidi) as the reason for his eviction from Magdalen. He is scornful of avowed celibacy in principle, and realizes on a personal level that he would suffer from trying to live as a celibate. In closing this letter, pointedly congratulating his friend on the birth of a granddaughter, he again implies an aversion not just to celibacy itself, but to the childlessness that necessarily accompanies it. Shortly after leaving Magdalen, he reaffirmed his desire for a family in a letter describing the head of the Lucy household, where he would meet his own wife: ‘I do not so much approve as I admire the judgment and manners of the man, of whom I have never in life seen one so honest and golden. Nor is all the family less pleasing in these things through matching its head, such that I long for one of the same quality.’4 In the Acts and Monuments, Foxe goes further than in his letters of the 1540s, in which he expresses revulsion at clerical celibacy either as sterilization or as feminization. Like Bale before him, he now describes it as a veil for whoredom and as such a mark of Antichrist. In the preface to the first edition of the Acts and Monuments, addressed to ‘the persecutors of gods truth, commonlye called Papistes’, he foregrounds the issue before any other point of conflict,5 coupling the ‘filthy’ and ‘unmaidenly lives’ of the papists with their ‘murders and slaughters’ in his recitation of their crimes, and throughout the work it is clerical celibacy – much more than transubstantiation – whose presence in the Roman church serves, along with the papacy’s dominance over secular rulers, as proof of Antichrist. The institution of clerical celibacy and its history is a constant theme throughout the work, and like the Image, the Acts and Monuments, the first edition of which takes as its starting point the year AD 1000 (Bale’s, and in this edition Foxe’s loosing of Satan from his thousand-year bondage), identifies the pontificate of Gregory VII (1073–85), misdated as beginning in 1067, as the point at which Antichrist’s dominance in the Roman church begins to see full realization: whereby appeareth the Prophesie of S. Paul truly to bee verified, speaking of these latter tymes. 1 Timot. 4. Where he writeth in these wordes. The spirite speaketh plainly, that in the latter tymes there


shall some departe from the fayth, harkenyng unto spirites of errour, and to doctrines of devils, forbiddyng to marye, and commaundyng to absteyne from meates.6 Gregory VII, or Hildebrand, called by Foxe ‘the chiefest and most principall enemy agaynst Priestes Mariage’,7 earns his own ‘tragicall history’ in the Acts and Monuments. Foxe emphasizes in tandem Hildebrand’s drive to prohibit clerical marriage, his sorcery (which he has in common with Sylvester II), and his sexual indiscretions:8 As he was a sorcerer, so was he the fyrst and principall cause of all this perturbation that is nowe and hath bene since his tyme in the church: by reason that through hys example, al this ambition, stoutnes & pride, entred fyrst into the church of Rome, and hath ever since continued. For before Hildebrandus came to Rome, workyng there hys feates: setting up and displacyng what Byshops he listed: corrupting them wyth pernitious counsel, and setting them against Emperours: under pretence of chastitie destroying matrimony: and under the title of libertye destroying peace, and resisting authoritie: before this (I say) the church of Rome was in some order, & byshops quietly governed under christen emperours, & also were defended by the same … But against this obedience and subiection Hildebrand first began to spurne, and by his example taught all other bishops to do the lyke.9 Hildebrand’s papacy is a critical step in the church’s descent into whoredom, signalled by the two causes Foxe claims dominated ‘all his striving and driving’ from the beginning of his career: ‘to abolish the mariage of priestes, and to translate the authoritie imperial to the clergy’.10 This latter goal culminates in his victory over Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor – Henry’s excommunication and subsequent humiliating display of submission to the pope.11 Foxe not only links Hildebrand’s usurpation of secular power to his attack on clerical marriage in the text of the Acts and Monuments, the identification of clerical celibacy with whoredom is made clear, and the connection between the papacy’s lust for power and for sex spotlighted, in the woodcut illustrating Henry IV’s submission. Henry is drawn as a poignant figure, waiting barefoot in the snow while the pope considers whether to receive and absolve him. Balancing the central figure of the emperor, above and to the right in a straight diagonal from it, is a window. Through it the pope can be seen seated,


wearing his tiara with his concubine in his lap, looking down on the penitent emperor and his family; his exalted, dominant, raised position is explicitly linked in this illustration to his lascivious relationship with the woman, his whore. Hildebrand’s hypocrisy in both his raisons d’être – secular authority and clerical celibacy – is revealed and symbolized by his whoredom, his hypocritical and adulterous lifestyle at the same time set against the familial solidarity of the emperor, his wife and child (figure 2). Hildebrand’s imposition or ‘pretence’ of chastity is explicitly noted as an excuse to attack marriage, a hypocrisy that Foxe also attributes to the first prelate to bring clerical celibacy to England, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109). Anselm was a protégé of Hildebrand’s, and like his mentor, of all his misdeeds, ‘this’, Foxe states, ‘is most principally in hym to be reprehended: for that he seing and perceaving what Sodomiticall feditie and abhomination, with other inconveniences, did spryng incontinently upon thys hys Diabolicall doctrine, yet for all that, would not geve over hys pestilent purpose’.12 Adding to this ‘inconvenience’, when it was clear that the prohibition of clerical marriage had brought

Figure 2 The submission of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII, in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: John Daye, 1583), I, 179


rife sodomy to England, Anselm, mocked as ‘this maidenly Prelate’, called a council at St Paul’s which passed this act: ‘All them that comitte the ungratious sinne of Sodomitrie, and them also which assiste them in this theyr wicked purpose, with grevous curse we do condemne, till such tyme as they shall deserve absolution by penaunce and confession, &c.’ Foxe’s outrage at this foreshadows that which he will show later, in reference to the leniency shown to fornicating priests under the Six Articles: ‘Is not here (trow you) good division of Justice, that lawful wedlocke of Priests can find no grace nor pardon, yea is made now heresie: where adultery & horrible Sodomitrie is washed away with a little confession?’ Confirming his hypocrisy, Anselm quickly withdrew from publication the act against sodomy at the behest, Foxe writes, of ‘the Monkes, perceavyng this matter to touch them somwhat nere’. So, he concludes, ‘cursed Sodomitrie and adulterie passed free without punishment, or word spoken agaynst it, where contrary, godly Matrimony could find no mercye’.13 Foxe’s distaste for Anselm and his tolerance of sodomy and lechery is magnified in his condemnation of Henrician policy, the primary target of his vitriol the chief architect of the Act of Six Articles (1539), Stephen Gardiner. Before addressing the act itself, Foxe marks Henry’s 1538 proclamation against the married clergy as a preface to it, anticipating ‘how religion began to goe backward’.14 The passage of the 1539 act, the ‘whyp with vi. Strynges’ as he calls it, is a watershed moment in Foxe’s history, tragic in its own right and foreshadowing the Marian persecution.15 This Foxe makes explicit in his first sentences on the act, in which he dismisses the claim of its supporters that it was designed to facilitate religious unity: ‘But what unitye therof folowed, the groning hartes of a great number, and also the cruel death of divers, both in the dayes of Kyng Henry, & of Queene Mary, can so wel declare, as I pray God, never the lyke be felte hereafter.’ 16 After this introduction, the articles and their penalties are listed, followed by a long section called ‘Allegations against the vi. Articles’ challenging them on the basis of their antiquity, or, rather, their lack thereof. Foxe disposes of the first three articles (concerning the nature of the sacrament and private masses) relatively quickly, devoting the majority of his pages to the fourth and fifth articles, both addressing clerical celibacy, offering a micro-history of the institution and its historical opposition.17 Foxe uses ancient sources to prove that the institution of clerical celibacy in the church lacks ancient standing, emerging only with the pontificate of Hildebrand, and that marriage is equal in holiness to


virginity and superior to avowed celibacy, which is in turn no more than a veil for whoredom and sodomy. His pièce de résistance in proving the institution’s recent imposition in the church is a letter from Valusianus, Bishop of Carthage (sometimes attributed to Hulderick, Bishop of Augsburg), to Pope Nicholas II (1059–61), a defence of clerical marriage based on the argument that the ability to be celibate is ‘the gift onely of Gods grace, and commeth not by the commaundement nor by free will’. Those that attempt to obtain it by their own will, therefore, err, as do they ‘whiche by force constrayne men agaynst theyr will thereunto … not remembring the saying of the Lord to Moyses: Separate amongest you the first fruites unto the Lord, & let every man of his owne voluntary and willyng mynde, come and offer the same unto the Lord.’ 18 By disallowing marriage to those without the gift, ‘ryseth the unnaturall and most execrable Sodomiticall fornication … the unlawfull and damnable defilyng of other mens wives … cursed and whorysh filthynes and pollution: and … most abhominable incest against all nature, with theyr own kyndred’.19 As Lot, after the destruction of Sodom, chose to live in Segor rather than ascend the mountain, chastity within marriage is laudable, if not virginity, and ‘is not deprived of the reward of the kyngdome of heaven. Unto this chastity, he is commaunded to flye which can not otherwise conteine, and to be saved in it, least peradventure if he clyme up to the mounte, he fall into inconvenience and perishe therin.’ Volusianus gives a salutory example: when Lot left Segor and ascended the mountain, he became drunk and fornicated with one of his daughters, ‘whiche thyng had not happened unto hym, if hee had kept hym selfe still in Segor’. He cites Paul’s advice to the Corinthians: ‘I wishe that all men were as I my selfe am but every man hath his proper gift of God.’ Thus, although ‘it is good for a man not to touche a woman’, for those who cannot be chaste, ‘to avoyde whoredome, let every man have his wife and let every woman have her husband’. Volusianus, who himself seems to have been married, nevertheless writes of virginity as a more exhalted condition than marriage: he is not able to ‘mount up to the toppe of virginitye’, and ‘flyeth therfore to the state of matrimony’. Foxe, in annotating Volusianus’s letter, reinforces its main arguments regarding the infirmity of man and the necessary whoredom and sodomy that will follow a ban on clerical marriage. He also, however, artfully changes Volusianus’s meaning at a crucial point, making of the letter not just proof of the relative youth of the ban on clerical marriage, but also an argument for the equal status of marriage to virginity. Against Volusianus’s words ‘for after those two kyndes of


continencye [virginity and widowhood], this chastity [matrimony] is also proved to be laudable, and is not deprived of the reward of the kyngdome of heaven’, Foxe places a shoulder-note: ‘The chastitye of mariage, as neare to heaven as virginitye’. 20 The pleading realism of a man aware of his own and others’ weakness becomes an argument for the equal status of the married man and the celibate. Foxe constructs the ‘single life’ of priests as an historical and modern excuse for lechery, with clerical marriage banned because it threatens the context – the veil of celibacy itself – of impunity for Roman debauchery. It is awareness of this threat that inspires such harshness against clerical marriage, as in the Six Articles, especially when viewed against the comparative leniency shown to priests who violate their vows in fornication. Foxe thinks the implications of this difference obvious: In these ungodly procedynges of the Pope’s Catholicke Clergie, ii. thynges we have to note. I. First, the horrible impietie of their doctrine, directly fightyng agaynst the express authoritie of God and hys worde, forasmuch as that which God permitteth, they restrayne … Not only the Priestes that mary, but them also that say or cyphre that a priest may mary, at the first they kyll as felons … where as contrarywise a spirituall man may thryse defile his neighbours wife, or thrice defloure hys brothers daughter, and no felonie at all layd to his charge. What is this in playne wordes to say, but that it is lesse sinne thrise to commit advoutrie, than once to mary.21 Foxe continues, railing against Gardiner and his fellows: Fearyng your owne weake fragilitie, you provide wysely for your selves aforehand, that, where other shall suffer paynes of death at the first for well doing, you may fall thrise into abominable adultery, and yet by the law have your lyves pardoned … this moderation of the lawe provided before against your advouterous incontinenci, plainly declareth that either ye purpose willingly to fall, or at least ye feare and stand in doubt not to be able to stande … And be it to you admitted, that all do not fall, but that some kepe their vowe, though some viciously runne to other mens wives and daughters: then here agayne I aske you, seyng these vicious whorehunters & advouterous persons amongst you … what iniquitie is this in you, or rather impietie inexcusable agaynst God and man … How can ye heare be excused, O you children of iniquitie?… You


that neither are able to avoyde burnyng and pollution without wedlocke, nor yet will receave that remedy that the Lord hath gyven you … I cease to defile my penne any further in this so stinkyng matter of yours, leaving you to the Lord.22 While abhorring the brutality of the Henrician law revived by Mary’s government, condemning to death not only married priests but also those condoning their marriages, Foxe is most hostile to what he considers to be the heart of the matter, the impunity with which clerics could break their vows of chastity and the hateful irony of this when read against the ban on marriage. He interprets this as proof that Gardiner and his colleagues, when writing the act, planned to act as whoremongers, wished to do so and therefore provided for their sin in advance. The hypocrisy of the Roman church is thus revealed, ironically, by the presence of the veil intended to obscure it – to mask an insatiable lust, one that exercises itself both sexually and with violence, as Foxe makes explicit in his narrative of the massacre of French Lutherans in Merindol in 1530. Like Hildebrand’s papacy and the Henrician Act of the Six Articles, the Merindol massacre is highly symbolic to Foxe of the cruelty and harlotry of Rome. 23 The legal slaughter of the residents of Merindol, condemned to death by the Parlement of Provence, is itself horrifying to Foxe, as well as to his source for the story, the French polemicist and historian Jean Crespin. However, both authors suggest that due to the opposition of reasonable men to the decree it would probably not have been executed but for the intervention of a whore, the concubine of the Bishop of Aix. Foxe’s narrative of the massacre and the events surrounding it is for the most part a word-for-word translation of Crespin’s Histoire.24 But more so than in Crespin, Foxe’s insatiable French whore serves not just to represent the licentiousness of the Roman clergy, but as a type, herself, of the Catholic Church. She first appears in the narrative at a banquet, at which she begins praising the sentence against Merindol, in which she is challenged by the would-be hero of the story, the compassionate Lord Beauvieu. He argues passionately against the sentence, exclaiming, ‘woulde to God that all Priestes harlots should chatter like Pies’, to which the concubine responds meaningfully, ‘you ought not so to speake agaynst our holy mother the Church’. The argument continues until Beauvieu expostulates: ‘thou filthy and impudent harlot: is it thy part to open thy mouth to talke in this company? Dost thou well understand and knowe what treason to God, and man meaneth? Is it


not sufficient for thee to be as thou art, but thou must sollicite other to shede innocent bloud?’25 At this, the concubine declares, ‘for the devotion which I beare unto our holy mother the Church … I wil receive into my house, all religious men, to consult and devise the meanes how to put these Lutherans to death.’ Like Foxe, Crespin highlights the role of the concubine, and the Lord Beauvieu’s clear disgust of whoring and adulterous priests is one of the points of the tale. Foxe’s originality in his reproduction of this part of Crespin’s story is limited to the addition of shoulder-notes, but these are creative and telling, and add a meaning to the whore’s role in the story that is less explicit in Crespin’s. He uses an asterisk, for example, to mark the concubine’s response to Beauvieu’s declaration of her whoredom – ‘say you what you will, I will not refraine for any man living to go, either by day either by night, unto the houses of Bishops, in all honesty & honor’ – with the words, ‘the visor of honestie on an harlots face’. Later, in response to the harlot’s evocation of the ‘holy mother the church’, Foxe again places an asterisk, responding in the margin, ‘lyke mother, lyke daughter’. Other marginal comments include: ‘there is no crueltie to the crueltie of an harlot’; ‘A catholike wishe of a priests harlot’; ‘Well spoken, & lyke an harlot’; ‘The cruell hart of an harlot’.26 Foxe thus emphasizes the harlot’s cruelty with his shoulder-notes, but he does more than this, reminding his reader, with his reference to the whore’s ‘visor of honesty’, of the pretended face of chastity so reviled by Bale. The harlot is not just dishonest herself, she exemplifies not just priestly whoredom and papist cruelty, but the hypocritical lust of the church herself: like the church she is a harlot, but a harlot hidden behind a visor of honesty. The connection between the personal dishonesty of the harlot and the identity of the church itself as a whore is reinforced by another marginal comment, ‘like mother like daughter’, Foxe making it clear that the harlot and the church are one. In this passage it is the church that is the target of the good Lord Beauvieu’s criticism; it is she who is bloodthirsty, and Foxe emphasises in his notes that her lust for sex is akin to and matched by her lust for blood – she is insatiable in both lechery and cruelty, even if her lust is thinly veiled with a ‘visor of honesty’.27 The residents of Merindol are described at length in their virtue, and the scenes describing both their fear and their slaughter are given added poignancy by repeated references to their familial love and solidarity. When aware of their fate, they mourn together, ‘the father with the sonne, the daughter with the mother, the wife with the husband’.28 Hoping that the authority charged with carrying out the massacre will


spare the town’s women and children, the men separate themselves from them: ‘No tounge can expresse, what sorrow, what teares, what sighing, what lamentation, there was at that wofull departing, when they were compelled to be thus separated a sunder, the husband from his dere wife, the father from his swete babes and tender infants, the one never like to see the other agayne a lyve.’ 29 To no avail: the women and children were brutally slaughtered along with the men. As with Prest’s wife, faithful to the end to her heavenly husband, and the priest who torments her as amusement for his concubine, the married Merindolians and the lecherous whore responsible for engineering their slaughter appear in stark contrast. This dichotomy – of faithful, Protestant marriage and celibate, Catholic whoredom – is Foxe’s obsession, as it is Bale’s. Again, not just the violation of avowed celibacy, but the very idea of perpetual virginity – itself whoredom – repulse him. But this has serious implications for his larger project, as, like Bale, Foxe is working according to the agenda of proving that his church – the modern Protestant church – is the true descendant of the primitive church – a church in eternal opposition to the false, now manifest in the Roman papacy. This church, however – a church historically accessible in ancient and medieval chronicles and martyrology – is littered with the dead and dying bodies of tortured virgins, in particular young women sacrificed as it were on the altar of their own perpetual virginity, a virginity symbolizing, in their vitae, marriage to Christ. Foxe’s use of nuptial language, as in his description of the trials and martyrdom of Prest’s wife, is reminiscent of pre-Reformation Catholic hagiography, the vitae and passios in which female martyrs end their lives like Prest, as sponsa Christi.30 As discussed in Chapter 3 above, the flight from sexuality is the dominant topos of such pre-Reformation vitae sanctarum. For women saints and martyrs it is compulsory for union with God, and while some women achieve union after rejecting existing sexual relationships, most decide upon a life of virginity during early adolescence. While the basic ingredients of ancient male and female martyrology are the same – the martyr refuses to participate in pagan idolatry; he or she briefly debates an antagonist, affirming his/her Christian faith; he/she destroys idols and/or performs miracles, and endures excruciating torments 31 – the striking difference between the legends of martyred men and women is the preoccupation with sexuality in the latter: a young woman’s resistance of sexual indebtedness often sets in motion her journey towards martyrdom, in the process providing the basis of and justification for her defiance of familial and secular authority.32


The female martyr’s obsession with her own virginity represents, in medieval martyrology, her distance from and even opposition to worldly values. Other-worldliness is a necessary quality in all those sanctified in medieval hagiography, but it is of particular importance in female hagiography, as something prized of women, martyred or not. In effect, while all martyrological biography is designed to be exemplary, teaching Christians to resist idolatry, female martyrology idealizes a type of womanhood, valorizing holiness and virginity ‘both as a religious ideal and a cultural exemplum for women’.33 Even when learned and eloquent, virgin martyrs serve as models of passivity, piety and silence: by their virtuous femininity – a femininity opposing itself to the world (in effect, male space, and even male sexuality) – they earn the permission to describe their own exemplary behaviour, most particularly, their commitment to virginity, in words written by men. Thus, while in all saints’ vitae, subjectivity and identity are replaced by a culturally conceived idea of holiness, in female hagiography, as Gail Ashton has recently argued, ‘representations of saintliness become inextricably mingled with representations of ideal womanliness’. 34 While all saints serve as models for saintly behaviour, women saints serve as models for female behaviour. As models for female behaviour, the most important characteristic common to most ancient and medieval female martyrs is thus their virginity – and not just the virginity expected of them as unmarried, usually quite young, women. While he certainly would not have been inclined to advocate pre-marital sex for adolescent girls, once he had decided to incorporate the persecutions of the early church into his history Foxe had to grapple with the image of early Christian female sanctity as largely based on a commitment to perpetual virginity. He did this by diminishing the privileging of virginity as a life-choice in the stories of the early female martyrs, while continuing to celebrate their status as sponsa Christi, and to recognize the virtue of their youthful chastity. Foxe cites numerous sources for his material on the persecution of the primitive church, most frequently Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, but his most important if unacknowledged source for the period is a multi-volume Protestant history of the church, the Ecclesiastica Historia, or the Magdeburg Centuries (1561–74), attributed in its editorship to Matthius Flacius Illyricus. 35 Foxe was working, therefore, with a continental source already committed to the Protestantization of Catholic history, an agenda he shared. In his incorporation of female martyrs of the primitive church, however, Foxe at times deviates from this source,


returning to more ancient martyrologies, as is the case with the vitae of the virgin martyrs, Saints Eulalia, Eugenia and Agnes. In his adaptation of the legend of St Eulalia, for example, he uses the vita in Latin verse penned by the Spanish saint, Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348–ca. 413), who wrote a number of poems memorializing the early martyrs. Flacius also uses this source, and in fact most of Prudentius’s poem is faithfully reproduced in the Magdeburg Centuries, but Flacius omits the first part, thus passing over the details of Eulalia’s childhood.36 While Foxe begins his version as Flacius does, describing Eulalia as a virgin born of noble parents in the city of Emerita in Portugal, by deliberately turning from Flacius to Prudentius, bringing Eulalia’s childhood back into the account, he is able to mitigate the emphasis on her virginity. By manipulating his translation of Prudentius, he shifts the focus from her virginity to her youth, making it – not avowed virginity – the reason for her rejection of marriage. Key to Eulalia’s journey towards martyrdom is her refusal to marry a noble pagan chosen for her by her parents, a refusal prompting her trial, torture and execution. In Foxe, as in Prudentius, her refusal to marry serves as the immediate catalyst to her martyrdom. Both Prudentius and Foxe also describe her refusal to marry in tandem with her virtuous disregard for riches and luxury. According to Prudentius, ‘by this time she had previously given evidence, to direct her course towards the Father’s throne, and her body not dedicated for the marriage bed: as a little girl she herself put away children’s toys, was not known to play; she spurned amber, cast aside roses, rejected gold necklaces, she was in face severe, in step modest, and was practised, in her tenderest years, in the ways of old age.’37 Foxe, however, while also praising Eulalia’s rejection of luxury, is less inclined than his source to deny her all the privileges of youth. Rather than linking her rejection of luxury to a rejection of childhood itself, he makes her lack of interest in luxury, like her lack of interest in marriage, a natural consequence of her youth: Twelve yeares of age was she and not much above, when she refused great and honourable offers in marriage, as one not skilfull of, nor yet delighting in cowrtlye dalliance, neither yet taking pleasure in purple and gorgeous apparel, or else in precious balmes, or costly ornaments and iuells. 38 Presumably, albeit modestly, playing with her toys – unlike Prudentius’s young but old Eulalia – Foxe’s Eulalia, as befits a twelve-year-old, as yet


lacks interest or skills in courtly dalliance, nor is she ready to marry. Importantly, Foxe omits altogether Prudentius’s reference to Eulalia’s determination never to marry, which allows him to tell her story without her virginity dominating his narrative. While Flacius reproduces the part of Prudentius’s poem describing Eulalia’s trial, torture and execution, it is reasonable to suppose that having begun with it, Foxe used the earlier source for the remainder of her story. However, whether using Prudentius himself or Prudentius in Flacius, Foxe continued to mould the story to decrease its emphasis on Eulalia’s determined rejection of the marriage bed and desire for lifelong virginity. While, for example, Eulalia’s judge, in Prudentius, appeals to her to ‘respice gaudia quanta metas, / quae tibi fert genialis honor’, Foxe translates this as ‘behold what pleasures thou maiest enjoye by the honorable house thou camest of’, rather than, as it should be rendered, ‘consider the great joys you are cutting off, which honourable marriage brings to you’.39 Foxe’s touch is light, and he retains, in his translation, most of the judge’s arguments in favour of Eulalia’s marriage, but while in Prudentius’s version, attempts to force Eulalia to marry are clearly intended to be read as attacks on her faith, a reader of Foxe reads with his emphasis, on Eulalia’s youth, her disinterest in the luxurious lifestyle promised by marriage to a noble pagan, and her refusal to be moved by appeals to her family’s honour. Both Prudentius and Foxe describe Eulalia as a Christian martyr who dies because she will not worship the Roman gods, but in Foxe there is no suggestion that her refusal to marry at twelve would have translated, had she lived, into a refusal to marry – at least to another Christian – at 20. Eulalia is not the only ancient martyr to lose her commitment to lifelong virginity in the Acts and Monuments, even while refusal to marry remains the act by which the journey towards martyrdom begins. Like Eulalia, St Eugenia, the daughter of the president of Alexandria during the empire of Valerian, also rejects marriage to a noble pagan, and again, in her case, Foxe deviates from his source to craft her story. Eugenia is given short shrift in the Magdeburg Centuries, and so Foxe turns to Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis (1434–1520) for his information, translating, again, from the Latin. Eugenia, unlike Eulalia, flees her family home when faced with the prospect of marriage, joining a monastery and eventually becoming its abbot, only to be martyred years later when forced to expose herself as a woman in order to refute a charge against her of rape. Bergomensis describes Eugenia’s flight from home and family as a flight from marriage – any


marriage: ‘Most courageously Eugenia the virgin said. Would that the sentence of God would also happen to me, and that I could take no mortal man as a spouse.’40 Foxe, on the other hand, omits Eugenia’s dearest wish: in his version Eugenia flees either ‘to avoyde persecution, or refusing to marry with a pagane’.41 Even if it is her betrothal rather than the threat of persecution for her faith itself that Eugenia fears, which Foxe suggests is unclear, this is not because marriage itself is repugnant to her, but rather marriage to an unbeliever. Foxe returns to Prudentius for his version of the vita of St Agnes, one of the most famous of the ancient martyrs but one who receives little attention in the Magdeburg Centuries (Flacius refers his reader to Prudentius for her story).42 While Foxe, in Agnes’s case, does refer to her ‘dedicated or vowed virginity’,43 he removes from his narrative Prudentius’s suggestion that because of her virginity, a ‘double crown of martyrdom is maintained. Her body virgin (intacta) of any sin, and next the glory of death [chosen] freely.’44 Rather, Foxe pointedly separates Agnes’s sexual status from the cause of her martyrdom: her virginity, he suggests, ‘deserveth no greater prayse and commendation, then for her wylling death and martyrdome she deserveth’.45 Confirming the peripheral importance of Agnes’s virginity, he omits reference to it from her scene of death, instead focusing exclusively on her constancy and the cruelty of her tormentors. His Agnes, like Prudentius’s, meets death with joy, being ‘maryed unto Christ’. As his ‘spouse’, she ‘maye surmount and escape al the darkenes of this world, that reacheth even unto y skies’. In both accounts, Agnes offers a prayer before dying: in Prudentius she prays, ‘Eternal ruler open the gates of heaven, bolted before to one born of earth, and Christ call the soul following you, a virgin and also a sacrifice to the Father.’ 46 Her prayer in the Acts and Monuments, however, is less elaborate: ‘Receave (oh Christ) my soule that seketh thee.’47 While Foxe’s martyr prays on the basis that she seeks Christ, Prudentius’s Agnes supports her plea by drawing attention to her virginity. In the ancient account Agnes is a virgin martyr; in Foxe’s she is a martyr who happens to be a virgin. While several ‘holye maydes and virgins’ survive the transmission from his sources to the Acts and Monuments, Foxe subtly but pointedly deprivileges the virginity so valued in them, establishing his own ideal of female sainthood, of which it is no longer a condition. Rather than physical virginity, it is now spiritual chastity, of which idolatry rather than marriage would be violation, that is most prized in Foxe’s bride of Christ, but this kind of chastity, a marital fidelity replacing the virginity of ancient and medieval female saints, is equally important in the


Acts and Monuments in men and women. This is beautifully illustrated in Foxe’s lament over the suicide of Judge John Hales, who drowned himself during Mary’s reign. Otherwise if we wil adjudge all those to hell, that have departed the world after this sort, how many examples have we in the first persecutions of the Church … For what shall I thinke of those young men, who beyn sought for to do sacrifice to heathen Idols, dyd cast downe themselves headlong and brake their own neckes to avoyd such horrible pollution of themselves? What shall I say of those virgins of Antioch, who to the ende they myght not defyle them selves with uncleannes and with idolatrie … casting themselves headlong into a river … after the same maner of drowning, as this M. Hales did? What shal I say of other two sisters, which for the selfe same quarell did violently throw them selves headlong into the sea … that their good desyre to kepe their fayth and religion unspotted, was commended and praised … Now who is hee that would reprehend the worthy act of Achetes, which biting of his own toung, did spit it out into the harlots face?48 In this passage, Foxe conflates sexual and spiritual purity, artfully translating sexual integrity into a spiritual rather than a physical condition, driving this point home in the 1563 edition of the Acts and Monuments: who can tell whether master Hales meaning to avoid the pollution of the Masse, did likewise chuse the same kinde of death to kepe his faith undefiled, whereof there ought to be as greate respect and greater to, than of the chastitye of the bodye? But you will saye he ought rather to have suffered the tyrauntes. And why may not the same bee saide of the forenamed virgins. 49 In all cases – the young men killing themselves to escape the horrible pollution of idolatry; the virgins rather dying at their own hands than defiling themselves with uncleanness and idolatry; Hale’s likewise choosing to die rather than defile himself – idolatry is sexualized, becoming infidelity to Christ. Foxe underlines his point with his final example. The young man Achetes bites off his own tongue in an act of defiance against a harlot employed to seduce him and thus destroy him spiritually. Similarly, the Roman church, to Foxe, is a harlot bent on defiling the faithful Christian. By choosing to die rather than allow


such spiritual pollution, the true Christian, like Achetes, spits his tongue in her face. The harlot in this passage no longer serves as a metaphor for ancient superstition, however; in Foxe’s retelling of Achetes’s famous expectoration, the Roman church has replaced pagan Rome as the harlot. Like the virgin martyrs of the ancient church, Foxe’s modern martyrs reject the things of the world, including idolatry, in fidelity to Christ, their heavenly spouse. To do otherwise would be in effect to commit adultery. Foxe establishes their marital relationships with Christ at times by describing them as married to Christ in election, and at others by describing their deaths as marriages. Joanne Warne (Lashford), for example, ‘washed her clothes in the bloude of the Lambe, dying most constantely for hys word and truth, to whoe most lovinglye she espoused her self’.50 Prest’s wife, as we have seen, having rejected her earthly husband in favour of her heavenly one, went to her death ‘as though she had bene prepared for that day of her mariage to meete the Lambe’. Joan Trunchfield and Anne Potten, one a brewer’s wife, the other a shoemaker’s, are ‘both together now espoused to a new husband CHRIST’. 51 Margery Polley, herself bound for martyrdom, encourages Christopher Wade to his: ‘You maye reioyce, waide, to see suche a companie gathered to celebrate youre marriage this day.’52 As suggested in the final of the above examples, marriage to the heavenly spouse in the Acts and Monuments, unlike in traditional hagiography, is not exclusive to female martyrs.53 At times, male martyrs’ heavenly marriages are symbolized by the ‘wedding garments’ they die in, usually long white shirts reminiscent of the white garments worn by the martyrs of Revelation, much commented on by Bale in the Image and worn by Askew in the frontispiece of his editions of her Examinations. At other times, they are seen to use nuptial or erotic language to describe their embracement of martyrdom. Rawlins White, for example, has his wife make and send him his wedding garment,54 and when John Bradford puts on the shirt made for his burning, he makes ‘a prayer of the wedding garment’.55 Christopher Wade strips off his clothes before his execution to change into the white shirt given to him by his wife, only then to be encouraged to his ‘marriage’ by Margery Polley,56 and Anthony Peerson embraces the post at which he will burn saying, ‘“Now welcome mine own sweete wife, for this day shalt thou and I bee maried together in the love and peace of God”.’57 Poignantly, on the night before his execution, Nicholas Ridley ‘bad his hostes, and the rest at the bourd, to his marriage: for (sayth hee) to morow I must be maried’. In response


to his hostess’s tears on his behalf, he ‘comforted her, and sayd: Oh Mistres Irish, you love me not now, I see well inough. For in that you weepe, it doth appeare you will not bee at my maryage’. (Foxe adds in the shoulder-note, ‘D. Ridley biddeth gestes to his marriage’.)58 While the explicit language of martyrdom as marriage is less common (per capita) among Foxe’s male martyrs than among his female ones, their removal of themselves from earthly relationships often involves gestures indicating a replacement of identity, based on earthly family or status, with one based on election and thus intimate relationship with the divine. The act of kissing the stake, as Anthony Peerson is shown doing, is suggestive of entry into the intimacy – even eroticism – of marriage or the wedding night, as when John Cardmaker, ‘his prayers beyng ended, he rose up, put of hys clothes unto his sheirt, went with bold courage to the stake: and kissed it sweetly’. 59 This act was replicated by John Philpot, who also ‘kissed the stake’.60 When 13 martyrs – eleven men and two women – went to their deaths in Stratford the Bowe, ‘most earnestly they prayed unto God, and joyfuly went to the stake and kyssed it and embraced it very hartely’,61 as did Julius Palmer and his companions, who ‘put of their rayment, and went to the stake, and kyssed it’.62 Palmer’s removal of his earthly clothing is typical, a ritual both reminiscent of preparation for bed – as is the donning of white gowns – and meaningfully linked to separation from all forms of social identification, as in the story of Derrick Carver, who strips himself, ‘as a joyfull member of God’, before praying: ‘Oh Lord my god, thou hast written, He that will not foresake wife, children, house, and all that ever he hath, and take up thy crosse and folow thee, is not worthy of thee. But thou Lorde knowest that I have forsaken all, to come unto thee.’ 63 Thomas Watts similarly, after praying privately to himself, says to his family ‘words to these efect: Wife, and my good children, I must now depart from you. Therfore hence forth know I you no more, but as the Lord hath geven you unto me, so I geve you againe unto the Lord.’64 Foxe by no means invents the topos of heavenly marriage in martyrology.65 However, in his work it both aids and accompanies a construction by which the problematic details of martyrs’ lives lose relevance, which is of particular importance when the martyrs in question are disorderly women. While in pre-Reformation martyrology women’s marriage to Christ is reflected in the virginity of their bodies – itself proof of faith – in Foxe’s work, as in Bale’s, it reflects a spiritual fidelity to Christ that earns the martyr a status that cannot be brought in to question by the details, however salacious, of their lives: the


sexual history of the Protestant bride of Christ is irrelevant. This is dramatically illustrated in the development between the first and second editions of the English Acts and Monuments of Foxe’s narrative of the deaths of the Guernsey martyrs. The gratuitous cruelty of the family of women’s executioners, and the horrible spectacle of the murder of Massey’s baby, dominate the Guernsey story in each edition; however, there is a subtle change in emphasis after the first. In the 1563 edition Foxe is hesitant in assigning the Guernsey women the status they later achieved as martyrs. His purpose in telling their story is to demonstrate the extraordinary behaviour of the Catholic authorities, particularly in murdering the child born so violently to Perotine Massey in the flames. The women in fact promise to obey ‘the ordinances of the popishe church’, and when sentenced to death, they make appeal: ‘for they knew not to have offended the majesties of the king and Quene, nor of the churche, but intirely would obey, observe and kepe the ordinaunces of the king and Quene, and of the churche, as all good and true subjectes are bound to doo’.66 Their burning is an example (as against the more lenient punishment of the woman whose theft precipitated their tragedy) of the cruelty of the ‘adversaries … to the truth’, by whom ‘thefte was more bolstered & maintained … then those that professed the gloriouse gospel of Jesus Christ, or semed to beare anye good wyl that way’.67 Describing their deaths, Foxe describes the child bursting from Massey’s stomach ‘at the tyme that the sayd good poore women were burning in the fyre flames about them’.68 In the first edition the women are not called saints, members or spouses of Christ; they are not described marrying Christ, approaching martyrdom as if it were marriage, even sleeping in the Lord or joyously accepting death. They are called ‘good and godly women’. Their willingness to conform to Mary’s laws underlies Foxe’s ambivalent allusion, not just to those who profess the gospel, but also to those who ‘semed to beare anye good wyl that way’. In so far as the cause, not the death, makes the martyr, the Guernsey women are not martyrs. Along with Massey’s unborn child, they are caught in a net of cruelty, but they do not appear, in the 1563 edition, particularly saintly. In the 1570 Acts and Monuments, as part of his response to Harding’s attack on Massey described in Chapter 4, Foxe subtly reworks aspects of the Guernsey martyrs’ trial and death-scenes. The condemnation of papist cruelty to ‘those that professed the gloriouse gospel of Jesus Christ, or semed to beare anye good wyl that way’ is omitted, and Massey, her mother and sister become clearly drawn martyrs, rather than mere examples of the cruelty of the papists. The non-committal preamble to the


child’s tragic birth – ‘the sayd good poore women were burning in the fyre flames about them’ – is gone, replaced by a description more clearly hagiographic: ‘these three good servauntes and holy Saintes of God, the Innocent mother with her two daughters’ are brought to where they ‘should suffer, in the place where they should consumate their Martyrdome’.69 The Guernsey women in the second edition are not only called ‘Saintes of God’, their sanctity is deliberately linked to the word ‘consummation’. Their deaths are rewritten as martyrdoms, and the martyrdoms written as (sexual) completion of marriage.70 Foxe does not miss an opportunity, and in his defence of Massey and rewriting of her death as martyrdom, he at the same time draws a direct distinction between her and those whom he considers real whores: monastics and other ‘practicers’ within the Catholic church. As will be recalled, Harding had accused Massey, by the very fact of being burned to death, of murdering her child: she had failed, he argued, to claim the benefit of pregnancy in order to avoid execution due to her shame over her child’s illegitimacy (an illegitimacy Foxe refutes). While Massey, Foxe retorts, certainly did not murder her child, many do commit such acts as a matter of course: What hand did she lay upon the childe. None. What weapon used she? None. Did she then drowne it, or cast it in some ponde, as we read of the strompetes at Rome, whose childrins heads were taken up in Pope Gregoryes mote, by hundrethes, what time Priestes began first to be restrained of lawful wedloke 71 … or els did she throw it by the walles into some privie corner, as I am credibly certified … certeine scalpes & other yong infantes bones were found & taken out with a sticke in y hole of a stone wall in Lenton Abbay, by certein Gentemen w’in the County of Nottyngham … walkyng in the Priors chamber? Or otherwise did she take any hurtfull drinke to impotionate the child within her, as commonly it is reported, few nonneries to have ben in England, wherin such a tree hath not bene growing w’in their ground, meete for practising of such a purpose. Neither so, nor so. What then? Did she purposely and wyttyngly thrust her selfe in jeoperdy, to the destruction of her childe, when she needed not, as Pope Joane, when she might have kept her bed, would needes adventure forth in procession, where both she her selfe, and her infant perished in the open streete?72 ‘For so much as M. Hardyng is here in hand with infanticide’, he adds, ‘and with castyng a way yong childrens lives, I would wishe,


that as he hath sifted the doynges of this woman to the uttermost, who was rather murdered then a murderer, so he would with an indifferent eye loke on the other side a litle upon them of his owne clergie, and see what he could finde there among those wilfull contemners of immaculate mariage.’ God above, he assures Harding, knows the crimes of ‘incontinencie’ rampant among the Catholic celibates, male and female. ‘I say no more’, he adds rather ironically, ‘and not so much as I might’, but whether infanticides or not, Harding and his ilk are more worthy to be accused of homicide than any of the victims of their persecution: children and servauntes of God, both men and women, wyves and maydes, old & yong, blind and lame, madde and unmadde, discreete and simple innocentes, learned with the unlearned, and that of all degrees from the hye Archbishoppe to the Clarke and Sexten of the church, and that most wrongfully and wilfully, with such effusion of innocent Christian bloud, as cryeth up dayly to God for vengeance. Harding would be well served to convince his superiors to cease the persecution of innocents, ‘and furthermore to exhorte in like maner these Agamistes, and wilfull rejecters of matrimonie, to take themselves to lawfull wives, and not to resist gods holy ordinance’.73 Perotine Massey, her sister and mother were not ideal martyrs. In life they were clearly willing and even desperate to conform to Catholicism in order to save their lives. However, when attacked by Catholic polemicists, it was Massey’s questionable sexual integrity that made her a target. In his response to Harding’s attacks on Massey’s chastity, Foxe not only defends her in practical terms (conveniently, he could find a husband for her), he also rhetorically makes her the martyr she was not before, supplying her at the same time with transcendent status, changing her from a mere victim of Catholic cruelty into an active spouse of Christ: his ‘saint’, once merely a good and godly woman, now, as a married one, consummates her martyrdom, whereas before she had simply burned. Having in this case first established her earthly marriage, by then marrying her to Christ Foxe completes the process of her sanctification. As she consummates her martyrdom, the (perhaps sordid) details of her life lose significance – martyrologists should not have to play the Sumner. At the same time, however, in defending Massey’s innocence, Foxe again draws attention, by way of contrast, to the sexual incontinency demanded of


Rome by its godless rejection of matrimony – its denial of marriage to its priests and monastics, male and, in this case, female.74 Even while defending the legitimacy of Massey’s baby – by proving her to have been a married woman – he lampoons the Catholic rejection of marriage, transferring the accusations levelled against her back on Catholicism itself, spotlighting its whoredom, its contrariety to the chastity of Christ’s bride. Election, to Foxe, was marriage to Christ, a spiritual bond whose betrayal, through idolatry, was adultery. When brought into conflict with the world, its laws and expectations, members of Christ’s elect – his brides – had to choose a master or patriarch, and they chose their heavenly spouse, finding martyrdom in the process. Immersed in an apocalyptic battle between Christ and Antichrist, Christ’s bride and the Whore of Babylon, Foxe’s martyrs, female and male, prove and consummate their marriages to Christ. In so doing they sacrifice the things of the world, including earthly relationships and strictures of gender, and demonstrate themselves perfect in their spiritual marriages. But what was the nature of this perfection – the perfection of a perfect wife, herself a perfect woman? Like Bale’s New Jerusalem and his own Ecclesia, Foxe’s perfect wife is submissive, obedient and, above all, selfabnegating. There is nothing she will not suffer for her husband, but in the Acts and Monuments, the husband in question is Christ. This fact has created a problem for those who would read the Acts and Monuments for an image of ideal female behaviour, for in acting the perfect wife, the martyrs paradoxically violate the gendered codes regulating traditional ideas regarding earthly, and certainly marital, behaviour. In fact, the reader can look in vain for a female martyr in the Acts and Monuments who follows those codes in her earthly existence: as Miles Huggarde argues in The Displaying of the Protestants (1556), martyrdom itself necessarily precluded a woman’s fulfilment of her social responsibilities. However, Foxe does offer a parable of faithful wifely conduct in his story of one godly man’s persecution, entitled ‘A notable and famous example of fidelity in a matrone towardes her husband’. 75 As is not the case in his stories of female martyrdom, Foxe introduces this one with the promise that it describes a woman’s exemplary behaviour. Yet, its content comes as something of a surprise. The tale of the virtuous matron, set in Henry VIII’s reign, opens with an attack on Dr London, president of Wolsey College, Oxford, by whose behaviour ‘may evidentlye appeare, what fidelitye is to be looked for, in these cruell kinde of papists’. 76 The story revolves around the theft of some gold plate from London’s college, sold by the thief to a goldsmith


called William Calaway, a man of ‘good and honest name and reputation … but specially earnest and zelous towards the gospell, and a great maintainer therof’. Calaway had purchased the plate, according to Foxe, in all honesty, but London, learning that he was a Protestant, insisted on bringing charges against him, declaring ‘that he woulde spare neither labour nor coste, but he woulde bringe the Goldsmith to the gallowes’. Calaway was duly arraigned as an accessory to the theft, and found guilty of a felony punishable by death. (The thief, a member of Wolsey College, remained at liberty.) When invited to present an argument against his own execution, Calaway requested ‘the priveledge of his boke, according to the auncient custome and manner’, but was told that he could not have it because he was bigamous: his wife had two husbands. 77 At this point, Foxe’s exemplary matron enters the tale. Despite her introduction by Foxe as a ‘woman of proved honesty and good name’, Mrs Calaway is obviously a problematic character. Perceiving that her former relationships were proving detrimental to her husband, she appeared before the judges and took an oath to the effect that ‘she was never married to mo men then to the said goldsmith; althoughe she had children by her other husbandes, and continued divers yeres with them, yet she sware she was whore to them both, and not marryed’. This, says Foxe, was a lie, and he explains her motives: This good and lovinge woman by defaming of her selfe to her great praise, and singuler example of love, delivered her innocent husband: thinking it better for her to live with ignominy and reproch, then for her husband to die, lesse esteminge the losse of her good name then of his life. But here I wil not discusse the reason of her fact of perjurye, but leave it rather unto the exact judgements of the devines. But I truly do much commend and praise this singuler and rare example of love in this woman. In that I finde it so geason in a great nomber of matrones.78 Foxe suggests two things about his favoured matron: she lied under oath to save her husband; and she was a woman of good reputation and honesty. But both these things cannot be true. Mrs Calaway was either a bigamist or a woman of seriously questionable behaviour, who, prior to her present marriage, had lived with and had children by at least one other man, outside the institution of marriage. This conundrum Foxe does not attempt to solve, instead leaving the details to the musings of divines (as if he were not one himself). He does, however,


admire this woman, presenting her, as he does not his women martyrs, for her self-abnegating love of and fidelity to her husband, as a model for emulation. In light of these things, her dishonesty of word and, apparently, of body is and ought to be forgiven. This is an odd parable: its hero is not the goldsmith, persecuted for his accuser’s hatred of the gospel, but a woman – his wife – who saves him either by lying under oath, the lie itself proving her bigamy, or by revealing a history of sexual dishonesty.79 Foxe presents as virtuous a woman exemplifying social disorderliness, and at the same time extraordinary marital fidelity. She is thus comparable to those of his female martyrs who sacrifice their reputations along with their lives, violating the gendered strictures of their society in a demonstration of fidelity to their spouse, in their cases heavenly rather than carnal. The martyrs’ relationships with Christ are analogous to earthly marital relationships, relationships in which the self-abnegation of wives for the cause of marital fidelity is constant and unflinching; but they are relationships conducted in a realm transcending that of earth and its concerns: the women martyrs, no longer the virgins of ancient Rome, are released by their elect status from the obligations of earthly marriage and society, obligations they reject for the sake of and in fidelity to heavenly marriage. While giving his female and male martyrs equal status by making them all brides of Christ, and providing at the same time a realm in which his female martyrs can escape the gendered strictures of earthly society, Foxe nevertheless participated in the re-categorization of womanhood as wifehood detected in Reformation discourse by historians like Lyndal Roper and Merry Wiesner. His writing, following Bale’s, is permeated with the true and false churches as female types, based on their success or failure in mimicking the behaviour acceptable of Christ’s bride, who though formed of a collective of sometimes problematic individuals, is an ideal wife. The true church is passive, meek, long-suffering; the false church aggressive, ostentatious, powerful. The true church is a chaste bride, sexually discreet within marriage; the false church lustful, lecherous, sexually deviant, represented by sodomitical priests and monks. The true church, like good society itself, encourages marriage and its progeny; the false church disrupts marriage, performs secret abortions and drowns infants in ponds. The true church is a happily married wife, faithful and obedient, like its female members, to her heavenly husband; the false church an adulterate whore, an enemy of the husband she claims, fornicating with kings, ever licentious, like her female members, nuns in nunneries –


in effect, like all her members, all insidiously effeminate (through their pretended chastity), like that ‘maidenly prelate’, the evil Anselm. Ultimately, the Catholic church becomes the Whore of Babylon veiled with clerical celibacy, but also an every-whore. By mingling fear of Catholicism and anxiety over female sexuality in this way, Foxe, like Bale, contributed to a discourse redefining what it meant not just to be Catholic, but also to be female. With all alternatives to holy marriage symbolically linked to the whoredom of Rome, all disorderly women – women out from under patriarchal control – came to be constructed discursively as whores. The Whore of Babylon signifies both the opposite of good women and the opposite of good religion, with the good in both cases symbolized by the good wife, a woman completely self-abnegating in fidelity to her husband, destroying her own reputation like Mrs Caloway in fidelity to her earthly husband, or her life like Prest’s wife in fidelity to her heavenly one, or – like Ecclesia in Christus Triumphans – saying of her beloved, ‘I am pleased finally, now that I am pleasing to my husband’.

6 Mrs Prest and the True Church: the Necessity of Disobedience

By the time he returned to England from his Marian exile in 1559, Foxe had been labouring over his history of the church for several years. The Acts and Monuments continued to develop as a project until his death in 1587, changing and growing from edition to edition; in this respect, it was never finished. Foxe began his 1554 Commentarii during Edward VI’s reign, and it was close to ready for publication before his departure for the continent in 1554. This, his earliest attempt to prove that reformed religion was the historic religion of the true persecuted church, was designed as a compilation of the accounts of those who had suffered for it at the hands of the papacy. It traces the persecution of the elect from 1375 (the time of Wycliffe) through the early sixteenth century, mainly concentrating on the English Lollards, access to information about whom he owed largely to his collaboration with Bale. The Commentarii was intended to be the first volume of two, the second to cover the trials of the true church through the Tudor persecutions, but this second volume never appeared. 1 The publication of the Commentarii prompted Edmund Grindal to approach Foxe to collaborate on a larger project.2 Grindal and some of his friends and fellow exiles in Strasbourg were planning a vernacular English account of the Marian persecution, and he encouraged Foxe to produce a Latin version, to be followed by an account of similar persecutions on the European continent, also in Latin.3 The first volume of this project is generally considered as the first edition of the later English Acts and Monuments.4 Foxe laboured over it from 1555 until the end of his exile, and although it remained unfinished, it was published as the Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum in 1559, immediately before his return to England. A folio volume of 750-pages, the Rerum reproduces the Commentarii as its first book; its second book covers 128

Mrs Prest and the True Church 129

the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI; and the third to sixth books describe the Marian persecution. The final account in the Rerum is the execution of Thomas Cranmer (21 March 1556), and on the last few pages Foxe lists, without elaboration, the names of martyrs who suffered after the archbishop. As the executions continued, it became increasingly difficult for Foxe and Grindal to envisage completing the Rerum, both because the documents for the history of the Marian persecution were difficult to collect from abroad, and because the horrible story refused to come to an end. When Mary died in late 1558, Grindal, the conduit for most of Foxe’s information on the martyrs, encouraged him to postpone publication until sources could be accessed in England, but the task of telling the complete story of the Marian reign responsibly came to seem so massive that Foxe brought out the Rerum before leaving exile and left the bulk of the Marian story for his later English project. The second Latin volume on the continental persecution, which Grindal had intended for Foxe to produce, was turned over to the Basle physician Heinrich Pantaleon. Foxe thus left the Latin project, and took over the English history from Grindal. During the summer of 1562, Foxe made arrangements with John Daye for the publication of the first English Acts and Monuments, which came out in March 1563. Dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, this volume is a much enlarged version of the story told in the Rerum, at 1,800 largefolio pages close to three times the size of the Latin book. Along with its dedication to the queen, it is fronted by a calendar of martyrs, two English prefaces (‘A Declaration Concerning the Utilite and Profite of Thys History’ and ‘To the Persecutors of God’s Truth, Commonlye Called Papistes’) and two Latin Prefaces (a prayer of thanksgiving and an epistle to the learned reader). It begins almost 400 years earlier than the Rerum, at about AD 1000, which marks, as in Bale’s time-line, the release of Satan from his bondage in Hell, and thus the preparation for Antichrist as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Queen Elizabeth is figured in Foxe’s dedicatory preface as a new Constantine (with Foxe her Eusebius), and the work ends with an optimistic description of the beginning stages of Elizabethan Reformation. Unlike the Rerum, the 1563 work is not exclusively about the English: it incorporates, in near verbatim translation, much of the French martyrologist Jean Crespin’s Histoire memorable de la persecution … de Merindol & Cabrieres (1555/56), and also borrows stories about French, German and other European martyrs from a manuscript version of Pantaleon’s Historia martyrum (1563), the companion volume to Foxe’s Rerum. 5


The 1563 edition of the Acts and Monuments was hugely successful. Following its publication Foxe was both inundated with information about Marian martyrs from their survivors and attacked in print by Catholic polemicists. He immediately began planning a second edition to the work, and this came out in 1570. The calendar does not appear in this edition. It had been controversial due to its similarity to Roman Catholic calendars, though it was reinstated in the fourth edition. Importantly, the dedicatory epistle to Elizabeth – now the second preface to the work – is much less effusive, with the queen no longer lauded as the new Constantine. The preface on the work’s utility remains, but Foxe removed the two Latin prefaces, replacing them with two English ones, ‘To the True and Faithful Congregation, of Christes Universall Church’ (the new first preface) and ‘To All the Professed Frendes and Folowers of the Popes Proceedinges’. The scope of the work, now 2,300-large folio pages divided into two volumes, is extended to trace the history of the church back to the pontificate of St Peter. Foxe also adds to the number of European martyrs, again drawing heavily on Pantaleon’s Latin martyrology, as well as on Crespin’s Latin Actiones et monimenta martyrum (1560) and French Actes des martyrs (1564). The development between the 1563 and 1570 editions of the Acts and Monuments is much more dramatic than that between the 1570 and later editions. The first edition, completed early in the reign of Mary’s successor, is self-consciously celebratory of both the death of the old queen and of the wisdom and benevolence of the new one. It begins and ends with panegyric to Elizabeth, who is lauded for her own suffering during her sister’s reign, as well as for the release from persecution that she represents. The second English edition, on the other hand, is often interpreted as reflecting a shift in Foxe’s mood away the optimism informing the first. Scholars like David Loades and Thomas Betteridge have argued that this edition reflects the concerns of the more ‘puritanical’ of English reformers, as well as worry over the continued threat to English Protestantism posed by indigenous and foreign Catholicism. Its increased scope serves to respond to Catholic attacks on Protestantism’s short history, and the new preface (addressed to the ‘Frendes and Folowers of the Popes Proceedinges’) may be a reaction to the northern rebellion of 1569 and the 1570 papal bull excommunicating Elizabeth.6 The most surprising change in the 1570 edition, however, an alteration which remains in the later editions, is the marked reduction in panegyric to the queen, which is reasonably interpreted by Betteridge as reflecting


Foxe’s disenchantment with Elizabethan reform.7 Foxe’s new structure is such that his story ends with Mary’s death: there is no relation of the early Elizabethan settlement, no extended comparison in the new queen’s favour between Elizabeth and her sister, and the story of Elizabeth’s suffering during her sister’s reign now appears as one of the final stories of persecution in the Marian narrative. Like his fellow Marian exiles, Foxe had great hopes with Elizabeth’s accession for a fully reformed church in England; his disappointment over the 1559 settlement, discernible to the modern scholar, must have been obvious to those within the Elizabethan establishment with the power to distribute patronage. Foxe is in some ways an Elizabethan oddity: a man of fame but little fortune; reputation but little preferment; popularity but little patronage, certainly following the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, his beloved former student, in 1572.8 Much of what we know about his lack of personal, professional success – whatever the importance of his great work and whatever esteem he may have been held in by his contemporaries – derives from Simeon Foxe’s assurance in his memoir of his father’s life, accepted by his generally sympathetic biographers, that Foxe cared little for wealth and creature comforts. This may be broadly true, but nevertheless, given the enormous popularity of the Acts and Monuments, the single prebend of Shipton, awarded to Foxe by William Cecil following publication of its first edition, is a minor legacy, and the greatest monument-maker to Elizabethan Protestantism, despite his known pastoral passion, failed to thrive within the Elizabethan church establishment.9 Foxe was one of many former Marian exiles whom we can confidently classify as early members of the English Puritan movement, a movement to purge the English church of ceremonies and trappings associated with Roman Catholicism. Elizabethan Puritanism, despite Patrick Collinson’s seminal account of its development and of the serious difficulties experienced by its membership, is often considered for its importance as an early stage of something else. The warmer Protestants of the 1560s are not as noisy, to modern ears, as the separatists of later Elizabethan and certainly Stuart England, and so they often fail to register as persecuted or even as particularly angry: while it is well established that the 1559 Settlement of Religion proved unsatisfactory to most of the Marian exiles populating Elizabeth’s episcopacy, so overjoyed were these now repatriated Englishmen, the story goes, by Mary’s early death and by Elizabeth’s nominal Protestantism that they hailed the new queen as a New Constantine, an English Deborah. English Protestantism was united against an undoubted enemy, the


papal Antichrist; and the greatest articulation of its unity was not the Act of Uniformity, but the Acts and Monuments. The Acts and Monuments both reflects and enshrines the anti-popery of Elizabethan English Protestantism, but it also articulates a view of the nature of the true church, to Foxe and many of his fellow Marian exiles neither English nor represented by the visible institution created in 1559. Of course, the Elizabethan churchmen involved in thrashing out the 1559 religious settlement, eager for further reformation, failed to realize right away that it was something other than a starting point. Born of political manoeuvring and compromise, and viewed in light of the expectation that Elizabeth would marry, ‘the details of her initial religious and political settlement could not be expected to survive’.10 An unsatisfactory basis for further reform was a very different thing from a wholly inadequate settlement of religion, but as the former seemed quickly to give way to the latter, protest was quickly reborn, creating division in the church and serious consequences for some of its members. Even from the earliest months of Elizabeth’s reign, a sizeable number of the queen’s clergy – in particular among the repatriated exiles – felt, and were, disenfranchised and disadvantaged. ‘Whether by choice, or of necessity’, as Collinson argues, they ‘remained on the periphery, devoting themselves to the pursuit of an ideal which differed materially from the official policy of the Church’.11 The exiles themselves were not a homogeneous body in terms of their Protestant ‘hotness’, and by the time Elizabeth came to the throne they had been known to battle among themselves over the extent to which the 1552 Edwardian Book of Common Prayer, as used in their émigré communities, should be retained or further reformed to rid it of ‘popish’ rites and ceremonies. The German city of Frankfort saw the most notorious acting out of such division, and the controversy there pays retelling here, because it famously foreshadows the divisions creating the Puritan problem of Elizabeth’s reign and beyond, and because it involved Foxe. The controversy arose when English congregations in Zurich and Strasbourg began objecting to changes made to the Prayer Book by William Whittingham, the small Frankfort congregation’s early leader. Whittingham and his associates responded to this criticism by inviting to Frankfort the fiery Calvinist John Knox to take over as leader of their congregation, and with Knox there, a committee of five men – Whittingham, Knox, Foxe, his friend Anthony Gilby and Thomas Cole – worked together to revise the English liturgy on the Genevan model. Shortly after Knox’s arrival, however, the congregation was joined by a former member of the Edwardian Prayer


Book Commission, the formidable Richard Cox, who, as A. G. Dickens puts it, resolved to ‘smash’ the Knox-Whittingham ascendancy. The division now dominating Frankfort, which would echo throughout Elizabeth’s reign, is well articulated in the following exchange between Cox and Knox: to Cox’s insistence to the Scot that ‘“they would have the face of an English church”’ Knox replied, ‘“the Lord grant it to have the face of Christ’s Church”’.12 For a time it seemed that Knox would win the field at Frankfort, and it took his expulsion from the city by its magistrates to ensure Cox’s ascendancy. This was accomplished when one of the lay members of the congregation, Edward Isaac, pointed out to the magistrates that Knox had attacked not only Queen Mary in his A Faithful Admonition to the Professors of God’s Truth in England (1554), calling her ‘“false, dissembling, inconstant, proud and a breaker of promises”’ and destined for Hell, but also the Emperor Charles V, who was described as ‘“no less an enemy to Christ than was Nero”’.13 This was too much for the Frankfort magistrates, who apart from anything else had no desire to antagonize Charles, and so they expelled Knox. Cox took over the congregation and reimposed the 1552 Edwardian liturgy. Foxe is one of several members of the congregation to put his name to a letter threatening secession, and he was also involved in attempting to convince the authorities to readmit Knox to Frankfort. Secede the discontents did, most moving with Knox and Whittingham to Geneva; Foxe left Frankfort for Basle, where he joined Bale and began his work for the Oporinus press. Foxe’s involvement in the troubles at Frankfort can serve as a useful barometer for measuring – or predicting – his feelings about the Elizabethan settlement. Those in exile tended to become, if anything, more radical as Mary’s reign continued, but the 1559 Act of Uniformity, while largely embracing the 1552 Prayer Book, also specified amendments designed to appease more conservative temperaments, the queen’s included. The act altered the communion service to allow for belief in the real presence, while the rubric specifying that kneeling to receive communion did not imply such belief was removed. While tender consciences could nevertheless still interpret the service as a purely memorial one, what would come to be the original sticking point between ‘Anglicans’ and ‘Puritans’ was clause 12 of the act, which directed the clergy to wear vestments in the communion service as they had been required to do in the 1549 Prayer Book. Those who had witnessed from abroad the slaughter of many of their friends for rejecting (as they believed) man’s doctrine and ceremonies for the sake of


Christ’s could not reconcile themselves to wearing such ‘romish rags’, clearly identifiable with the hated Catholic prelacy, and Foxe took his place among those explicitly rejecting them. But while he remained a peripheral figure in the coming vestments controversy, some of his closest friends came to lead the Puritan opposition, becoming, as a new generation, members of Christ’s persecuted true church. From the earliest days of Elizabeth’s reign, a number of the Marian exiles found it difficult to reconcile themselves to what was clearly a church but ‘half-reformed’. Whittingham, banned from preaching during his first year in England after returning from exile, would live out his Elizabethan career without preferment, emerging as leader of the ‘free-lance’ preaching ministry in some ways working against the efforts of the established church. Thomas Sampson, who collaborated on the Geneva Bible with Whittingham and Gilby, turned down the bishoprics of Hereford and Norwich when they were offered to him, while Miles Coverdale, as an early biblical translator a ‘father’ of English reform, refused the bishopric of Exeter, which he had held during Edward’s reign. Alexander Nowell, Foxe’s roommate at Brasenose, likewise refused the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield before accepting the deanery of St Paul’s; and even Edmund Grindal, Foxe’s friend and collaborator on the Rerum and the Acts and Monuments, apparently entertained doubts before accepting the bishopric of London. Similarly, John Parkhurst, who would host Foxe for a time after his repatriation, accepted the bishopric of Norwich with serious reservations, and when Lawrence Humphrey, another of Foxe’s closest friends, found himself asking Cecil for advancement, he apologetically explained that it was for ‘“necessity and not for profit or pleasure; of a care of my family, and not for love of having much”’. Foxe himself, who at this point had accepted no preferment, responded to Humphrey’s subsequent promotion to the presidency of Magdalen College, ‘“Come now, tell me, my friend, have you really deserted our flock and order?”’ 14 Collinson attributes the ambivalence of some of these former exiles not to qualms about episcopacy itself as much as to concerns about accepting high office in a church that was both faulty in discipline and retaining many popish ceremonies. Preferment did not equate to the alleviation of doubt, and Humphrey’s name appears on a list given to Lord Robert Dudley between 1561 and 1564, of 28 ‘“godly preachers which have utterly forsaken Antichrist and all his Romish rags”’, in contrast to ‘“the lord bishops and others that for worldly respects receive and allow them”’.15 This is strong, unequivocal and even


dangerous language, associating as it does practices in Elizabeth’s church with popery and Antichrist. Not just Humphrey’s signature but Foxe’s, along with those of his close friends Gilby, Robert Crowley and James Pilkington, appear on the list, as do Coverdale’s and Whittingham’s.16 While some signatories eventually accepted relatively high office in the church (only Pilkington became a bishop), Foxe, Crowley and Gilby did not, and most, rather than moving into the establishment, served as privately contracted itinerant or paid preachers. Foxe, for example, despite eventually accepting the prebend of Shipton, preached in Norwich for a while under the patronage of Parkhurst, before settling in London with the support of the Duke of Norfolk; Gilby served as a preacher in Ashby-de-la-Zouch under the patronage of the Earl of Huntingdon; and Whittingham enjoyed the patronage of John Russell, Duke of Bedford. The leaders of the early Puritan movement, identified by Collinson, considered themselves more a ‘brotherhood’ of preachers than a ‘party’ of nonconformists, but it was not long into Elizabeth’s reign that their self-identification as a persecuted group began to crystallize. This was largely the fault of Elizabeth herself and her intemperate interventions in matters of ecclesiastical discipline, by which she forced division between ecclesiasts and preachers who agreed on almost everything except, as Collinson puts it, ‘the crucial question of whether the queen was in all circumstances to be obeyed’.17 The first crisis of the reign in this respect was the vestments controversy of 1563–7, which marked the birth of the term ‘Puritanism’ – the bone of contention of which was the requirement that ministers wear the surplice when performing communion. By 1563, Foxe’s close friend Humphrey (now president of Magdalen and Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford), with Sampson (now dean of Christ Church, Oxford), was leading a party refusing to wear either the surplice or elaborate outdoor clerical dress, and in 1564 they were in negotiation with Archbishop Parker of Canterbury over their nonconformity. In March 1565, 20 nonconformists submitted an appeal to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners requesting exemption from the vestiary code, including Whittingham, Nowell, Coverdale, Crowley and Foxe. In 1566, Parker, responding to a letter from Elizabeth scolding him for failing to discipline his clergy, issued the famous ‘Advertisements’, which explicitly and without exception demanded vestiary conformity, which bishops were to enforce in their dioceses, with deprivation of office the price of non-compliance. Parker and a reluctant Grindal summoned 110 London clergy to Lambeth, where


they were ordered to promise conformity. Foxe was among the 37 who initially refused and were immediately suspended from preaching. Nevertheless, many of the suspended preachers refused to abandon their pulpits, taking their complaints to the press: Foxe’s good friend Crowley, one of the leaders of this group (with John Gough, John Philpot and John Bartlett), prepared for print the Briefe discourse against the outward apparel (1566) which prompted a print battle of sorts: following a response to Crowley’s tract, probably by Parker himself, and a returning salvo, again by Crowley, Gilby joined the fray with the first of Two short and comfortable epistles addressed to ‘my loving brethren that is troubled about the popish apparel’. Gilby’s epistle, first printed on the continent, was republished in the same year (1566) in England as the preface to The hunting of the foxe and the wolfe, because they make havocke of the sheepe of Christ. Its attachment to this latter piece, a reprint of William Turner’s Huntyng of the Romyshe wolfe (first published in 1554), as Collinson notes, has startling implications: the new title on Turner’s tract opposes the Elizabethan ‘foxe and wolfe’ – standard references to popery – to the ‘sheepe of Christ’, and a 1554 attack on the Marian prelates had now been appropriated as a weapon against the Elizabethan establishment.18 Crowley was deprived, like a number of his allies, and placed under arrest in the spring of 1566. Parker, by showing his willingness to use the weapon of deprivation, effectively quashed the leaders of the nascent Puritan movement within the church establishment, but freelance Puritan preaching continued, especially in London; there is some evidence, for example, that after Crowley’s arrest, Foxe preached for him in St Giles Cripplegate,19 where he would have become acquainted with its acting (if unbeneficed) curate (from 1567) John Field, a future collaborator in the later editions of the Acts and Monuments, admiring neophyte of Humphrey and Gilby, and co-author of the explosive An Admonition to Parliament (1572). Field was also a regular preacher at the Liberty of Minories, the birthplace, as it were, of separatist English Puritanism. Here, as Collinson argues, ‘was the “church within the Church” par excellence’, and it grew in direct response to Parker’s offensive of early 1566. 20 Between 1567 and 1569, well over 100 godly Londoners experienced imprisonment for nonconformity, developing into a distinct congregation ‘created by the stimulating experience of persecution’.21 These persecuted London Puritans associated themselves self-consciously with the London godly surviving in ‘privy churches’ during Mary’s reign, and they modelled their records of trial


and imprisonment on the Marian examinations appearing in the 1563 edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.22 The core belief surviving among the nascent congregations developing around the brotherhood of Puritan preachers also informed early Presbyterianism: that Christ and not the prince is the head of his church, and the supreme magistrate is bound to obey the word of God, as preached by his messengers. Foxe shared this sentiment, which is revealed in both his independent Elizabethan publications and in collaborative works that he would produce during the 1570s with radicals like Gilby, Whittingham and Field.23 Following from his belief in Christ’s headship of the true church – a headship at times colliding with the earthly headship of the visible church – Foxe shared with his fellow Puritans the conviction that the primary mark of the true church, a scattered and necessarily persecuted flock, is its resistance to laws that place man – any man – before God. In conceiving of the church in this way, Foxe envisages himself and his fellow godly according to an English model dating from Henry’s reign and realising itself in Bale’s Image, as well as in the Examinations of Anne Askew and the martyrology of John Oldcastle: the true church, not as a commonwealth of Christians, but as a ‘persecuted little flock of Christ’. 24 The Image, written against the background of Henrician persecution, is the key text of this view of the true church, and the antithesis of true and false churches, framing that work, informs the model: the true church is a spiritual body living in the inward faith of its members, while the false, now the medieval, Catholic Ecclesia, is known by its carnality. Secular rulers cannot be trusted, and it is a testament to the strength of Bale’s model that it survived to the end of Edward’s reign, allowing some Protestants, as Catharine Davies argues, to maintain ‘a crucial pocket of ideological independence’.25 Its adherents, Foxe among them, exposed the tension between Edwardian Erastianism and their own image of the church by producing controversial tracts attacking both the avarice and the hypocrisy of ‘carnal gospellers’ and attempts to fully merge realms of ecclesiastical and secular authority. During Edward’s reign, Foxe himself produced two relevant pieces addressing the division of authority specifically in the matter of ecclesiastical discipline. These were De non plectendis morte adulteris consultatio (1548) and De Censura, sive Excommunicatione Ecclesiastica, rectoque eius usu (1551), both of which express his belief that the covenant of the New Testament effected a release for the Christian from the laws and penalties of Old, and that spiritual discipline should not be determined by secular authorities. As he insists in De non plectendis, an argument


against the death penalty for adultery, he does not oppose the rightful authority of magistrates,26 but he strongly opposes those churchmen who want to see a return to Mosaic law, according to which secular magistrates punish crimes of the spirit, in this case, through death. It is, rather, the role of ministers to exercise that power, drawing on the power of the Word, disciplining with mercy and instruction, and focusing on the soul rather than the body. The gist of Foxe’s argument in De non plectendis is the very existence of the New Testament signalling, as he argues, the new realm of the spirit. Christ by his life, testimony and death released his people from the bondage of Mosaic law, according to which spiritual and civil discipline were combined. Why, he asks, if God meant for his people to continue following the Mosaic code did he offer a new merciful law through the life and death of his Son? 27 Why did Jesus, rejecting Mosaic law, refuse to stone adulterers?28 Foxe’s answer to these questions is simple: God provided the new law in order to release humanity from the old. In illustration of this, he employs an analogy which reappears in his later work, likening the new covenant to a widow’s remarriage: Christians have been offered ‘an early death’ to their first marriage (the Mosaic law) so that they can legitimately wed another, moving, as it were, from Moses to Christ.29 De non plectendis was denounced in print by Foxe’s fellow reformer George Joye, whose A Contrary to a certain man’s consultation (1549), written in English, advocates civil and ecclesiastical co-operation in ecclesiastical discipline. Joye sees the New Testament not as a nullification of the Old, but its confirmation, and he ridicules the idea that excommunication offers a viable alternative to corporal (or even capital) punishment for sin, as it has long fallen into disuse. To this, Foxe responded with De Censura, in which he proposes the full restoration of excommunication as a tool of ecclesiastical discipline. In this tract, he maintains his ‘rigid separation’ of temporal and spiritual powers, while, unlike continental reformers writing on the same subject, also suggesting that, when possible, godly magistrates should assist ministers in enforcing the ostracism of excommunicates. As Catharine Davies and Jane Facey have noted, Foxe’s advocacy of magistrates’ involvement purely at the level of enforcement is unique, as is his radical insistence that they should themselves be subject to ecclesiastical discipline. 30 Foxe was presumably inspired to write De Censura by Joye’s response to De non plectendis, but he was also encouraged to do so by Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, in the hope that it would influence a commission for reforming the ecclesiastical laws (which met in 1551).


As Davies and Facey argue, however, the work also grew out of a spirit of crisis: Foxe’s disillusionment over the effectiveness of Edwardian reform. The delivery of the Gospel to English men and women was not creating a better society; in fact, Edward’s reign was seeing an increase in corruption, immorality and the worldliness of ‘carnal gospellers’, such that God’s punishment was surely inevitable.31 While society’s sinfulness was a common theme in Edwardian rhetoric, however, Foxe’s focus on ecclesiastical discipline, rather than on civil law, was unusual; in fact, his is the only full-length discussion of the subject to emerge during Edward’s reign, as is its choice of target audience: not secular authorities, but the clergy. Foxe’s chosen agent of reform is the church, not the godly magistrate, who himself should be subject to clerical discipline. Foxe returned to the issue of ecclesiastical discipline in 1571, when he edited and published a code of ecclesiastical law (first drawn up during Edward’s reign by Thomas Cranmer), clearly in cahoots with Puritan colleagues, including Humphrey, William Strickland and Thomas Norton, the latter a member of parliament and custodian of Cranmer’s original manuscript since the archbishop’s death. This publication was timed to coincide with the 1571 meeting of Parliament, and had probably been in gestation since 1566, the year of Parker’s attack on the Puritan ministry and the year that Parliament had last met. Puritans in the 1566 Parliament had attempted to push through a number of bills designed to reform abuses in the church, but without success. In 1571, however, Puritan members in the Commons, including Norton, proposed adoption of Cranmer’s programme, pointing to Foxe’s published edition, Reformatio legum Ecclesiasticarum. Apart from the issue of ecclesiastical discipline, this publication, and Foxe’s clear partnership with Puritan members proposing its statutory recognition, is notable for its preface, a call for revision of the Book of Common Prayer by which it would be purged of all ‘popish remnants’. 32 Such revision was proposed in a bill introduced in Parliament by Strickland, and Strickland and Norton also attempted to push through a measure requiring subscription to the 39 Articles, but with the caveat that this apply only to the more strictly doctrinal of the articles. The Puritan effort of 1571 failed, deepening the divisions between Puritans and bishops, but Foxe’s involvement with this scheme marks his continued affiliation with the movement, a movement of preachers and their flocks – not of prelates.33 Foxe and his fellow Puritans saw themselves as a spiritual congregation, members of the true invisible church, and it is his affiliation with this group and with this idea that informs many of the changes in the


second edition of the Acts and Monuments. Susan Felch has noted that this edition is not just less celebratory than the first, it is also more specifically targeted to the ‘ordinary’, lay reader. Felch sees the dedications prefacing the 1563 edition of the work as casting an ‘elitist shadow’ over it, suggesting its appeal to an educated audience – the queen, learned readers and papist opponents, ‘groups not usually identified with the simple ploughboy or ordinary layperson’. 34 The 1570 edition, on the other hand, opens with a new first preface, even preceding the dedication to the queen, addressed to the ‘true and faithful congregation’, a body of the godly identifiable by their moral quality rather than their learning. Like the second preface to this edition, the wholly revised dedication to Elizabeth, the first articulates the view that the godly know themselves for what they are and are uniquely able to receive the teachings contained in the book: they alone can see the true church, of which they are members. As Felch points out, the purpose of this preface, and the revised dedication to Elizabeth, is to divide readers into those who know the truth and those who not only do not, but cannot. 35 This theme – of the unique ability of the godly to receive the word of God – is reiterated in one of Foxe’s two published sermons, A Sermon of Christ Crucified, which he delivered from the pulpit of Paul’s Cross on Good Friday, 1570, the year of the publication of the second edition of the Acts and Monuments. Betteridge has drawn attention to the pessimistic tone of this sermon, which was published in English also in 1570 (and in Latin in 1571). Despite what must have been its considerable audience – Paul’s Cross was the most popular pulpit in London, Good Friday was one of the most important days on the religious calendar and, significantly, Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth only the month before 36 – Christ Crucified, like the second edition of Foxe’s history, is rhetorically directed to a small audience, the true congregation, Christ’s poor persecuted flock. Pointedly, Foxe contrasts this group to ‘carnal gospellers’, at times mingling his criticism of the latter with salvos against popery. Foxe describes in detail the difference between the spiritual and carnal worlds, in the former of which alone the Christian can truly know the crucified Christ. He introduces the sermon with an ‘epistle dedicatory’ in which he justifies acceding to the wishes of friends and publishing the sermon. He does this, he writes, to awake the hartes of such Christians in these drowsie dayes of carnall securitie, to the contemplation of the glorious kyngdome


of Christ … and partly also for the Papistes cause to doe them some good if I could, who albeit they professe the whole history of Christes passion as we doe, yet by their doctrine it seemeth, they goe no further then the outward history.37 The antithesis is immediately drawn: Christians are lazy in their ‘carnall securitie’ and need prompting to contemplate the kingdom of Christ, which is not carnal, but spiritual. Likewise, the history drawn by Catholics, professing to be of Christ, is in fact merely ‘outward’ – significantly, the carnality of lazy gospellers is likened to the outward history of the papists. ‘To know Christ’, Foxe continues, ‘it is not sufficient to stay in these outward thynges: we must go further then the sensible man. We must looke inwardly with a spirituall eye into spirituall thynges.’ His instruction, ‘the Popes religion standeth all in outward thinges’, appears here in a shoulder-note, but it is clear that included among Foxe’s ‘sensible’ men are the ‘carnal gospellers’ of Elizabeth’s church – the majority of nominal English Protestants. The text of Christ Crucified is II Corinthians 5: ‘Pro Christo itaque, legatione fungimur. &C (In Christ’s name we come to you as messengers)’. Foxe asks his audience: Who sent the message? Who are the messengers? What is the message? The first question is the easiest to answer. God our head and king sent the message. It remains for ‘our partes’ to receive it and hear him: ‘let the flocke heare what the Pastor teacheth: the body what the head speaketh: the spousesse, what the spouse sendeth’. 38 The message is sent. The spousesse, deliberately feminized, must now receive it, which is difficult to do – and possible only for the spousesse – as it lies in ‘no mortall tounge to expresse the fulnesse of these deepe & profound mysteries of spirituall thinges’.39 Foxe’s agenda, woven into a discussion of the steps of salvation, is to exhort members of the true church to direct themselves and their attention to the heavenly kingdom: ‘For what have we to do with the world, which are redeemed out of the world? … This world is none of ours, let them have it to whom it belongeth.’40 The world of the predestined elect, for whom Christ died, is elsewhere. Although not visible to outward sight, it is ‘manifestly apparent to the spirituall eyes of our fayth in the scriptures and promises of God’. First suggesting that the elect do not yet possess the things of the heavenly world, Foxe reverses, imagining the New Jerusalem – the bride – of Revelation: ‘why may I not say, that we have them, and have entred corporall possession, seing our Agent and Factor is there and hath taken possession for us?’41 With his inward sight, the true Christian can see the ‘Citie of


God all garnished with glory, like a spousesse prepared for her spouse’.42 Freedom from the old law, or carnal world, this is ‘Libertas Christiana … the libertie belonging onely to the inward conscience of a justified Christian’. As in De non plectendis, Foxe again draws on the analogy of the remarried widow: Who shall nowe lay accusation against the elect? … So that like as if a woman be discharged from her first husband beyng dead, and hath maryed an other man, the first husband hath no more power over her: even so we now beyng espoused unto Christ our second husband, are freed utterly from our first husband the law.43 The elect Christian is the spouse – or spousesse – of Christ, released by her marriage from obedience to an earlier husband – the law, or even the world. Existing within a privileged space – the transcendent realm of the spirit – already able to see the city of God with her inward sight, she experiences a liberty belonging only to justified Christians, elect members of the heavenly congregation – members of the true church. The true congregation, the elect, the spousesse – these are all the same body, and that body is Ecclesia, the true church and spouse of Christ, a widow to the old law. Because she is married to Christ she is obedient to him, and to him above all other authority. Like Prest’s wife, or Mrs Calloway, who would perjure herself for the sake of her husband, Christ’s spouse defies earthly dictates as necessary to maintain her fidelity to her husband – her heavenly husband, if not her earthly one. For any authority attempting to interfere with the spousesse’s loyalty to the spouse is by definition outside the camp of the true church and, therefore, an agent of the false. This makes such authority by necessity anti-Christian and its agents, agents of Antichrist. Under some pens, such identification meant resistance – it had certainly meant resistance, even bloody resistance, to Mary. Foxe never explicitly defends the right of Christians to resist the law violently, but he does advocate disobedience, and not just to antiChristian churchmen. He was not a John Ponet, a Christopher Goodman or a John Knox in his political expression – had he been he would have found himself persona non grata in Elizabeth’s England – but his radicalism when it comes to his views on obedience have been obscured by the Elizabethan establishment’s celebration of the Acts and Monuments, by Foxe’s own belief in and support of episcopacy expressed in it, and again by the fact that the work is dedicated to his queen. While herself hating her sister, it is well known that Elizabeth


was infuriated by the suggestion that Mary’s rule was illegitimate. As David Loades has noted, she was very aware that ‘godliness can be in the eye of the beholder’. Loades, however, calling Foxe a ‘scrupulous upholder of the royal supremacy’, has argued that he fell in line with a rhetoric according to which Mary was ‘unfortunate, misled, even betrayed, but never evil in herself’.44 To Foxe, according to this interpretation, Mary was off limits. On the same theme, he argues in a 1993 article that to Foxe, ‘obedience to lawful authority was axiomatic’.45 This is a questionable interpretation, one impossible to sustain considering the celebration of disobedience that the Acts and Monuments is by its very nature. In support of his argument, Loades suggests that Foxe’s vision of the church corresponded to Richard Hooker’s, as summed up in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, truly, unlike the Acts and Monuments, a defence of the Elizabethan church: ‘“there is not any man of the church of England but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England.”’46 But this passage describes the visible church as envisaged by the ‘father of Anglicanism’, who, as Peter Lake has argued, invented an Anglican piety based on prayer and sacraments, as opposed to preaching. Outward profession, as Anthony Milton argues, not doctrinal purity, defined the church for Hooker, which allowed him to pose the inclusion of Rome in the visible church in a way that for Foxe would have been impossible, particularly if he were to conceive of the visible church as the true church.47 Essentially, while Hooker was a prototype Stuart Arminian, Foxe was most definitely not. Foxe did not believe with Hooker that the visible national church, headed by the prince, was the true church; rather, the true church, a small, persecuted flock, was headed by Christ. This difference in vision – a difference dating in English Protestantism from the 1540s – is neatly articulated in the exchange between Cox and Knox in Frankfort, when Knox replied to Cox’s assertion that ‘“they would have the face of an English church”’ with ‘“the Lord grant it to have the face of Christ’s Church”’.48 It is no surprise that Foxe preferred the ‘face of Christ’s church’ to the ‘face of an English church’, and within a year of leaving Frankfort he had published the apocalyptic comedy Christus Triumphans, in which the church is characterized as a wandering, persecuted, helpless woman, whose children are scattered across the world and whose apotheosis would come not with the ascension of a godly monarch, and not within an elect nation, but with the return of Christ. Nevertheless, Foxe’s continued loyalty to Knox, in light of the Scot’s direct condemnation of Foxe’s,


albeit heretical, queen – and not just her counsellors – is instructive. While Knox had yet to call Mary a Jezebel in 1555, as he would do many times, most famously in his 1558 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (although he does liken her to Jezebel in the Faithful Admonition, as well as to Athalia and some other questionable biblical figures), Foxe did not reject this sort of rhetoric himself, and his relationship with Knox survived even Elizabeth’s fulminating reaction to the First Blast.49 Clearly, Foxe had to be careful with his own rhetoric against Mary, but, in the Acts and Monuments, he does reveal his personal revulsion towards her and his belief that God felt the same. He allows, for example, one of his martyrs to call Queen Mary Jezebel, an attribution that identifies her, as we have seen, with idolatry, promiscuity and the Whore of Babylon.50 The martyr is Alice Dryver, given, in the Acts and Monuments, the longest and most intellectually challenging examinations of all the woman martyrs. As narrator, Foxe tells his reader that Dryver had called Mary Jezebel, and in relating the details of her punishment for this he describes her conduct in a manner usually reserved for his martyrs’ executions: for that, syr Clemente Higham, beinge chefe Judge there, adjudged her eares ymmediatly to be cut of, which was accomplished accordingly, and shee joyfully yelded her selfe to the punishment, and thought her selfe happy, that shee was counted worthy to suffer anye thinge for the name of Christe.51 Dryver may really have called Mary Jezebel, but Foxe himself asserts that in doing so she was serving Christ; that her suffering for it was suffering for Christ. As she would later, when being burnt for denying transubstantiation, Dryver suffered for Christ – thus, Christ was served when she called the queen Jezebel. Dryver’s appellation of Jezebel to Mary appears in every edition of the Acts and Monuments, and Foxe brings deliberate attention to it, celebrating it in shoulder-notes in the first and later editions, and in the first even highlighting it in his index: ‘Quene Mary Jesabell’.52 But he himself took a greater risk in the second edition than in the first by explicitly condemning the Catholic queen as directly culpable for the slaughter of so many members of Christ’s church, suggesting that God himself blamed her, and punished her, for her defiance of his will. As has been noted, the panegyric to Elizabeth sees a remarkable decrease in this edition, but what is less remarked upon is the parallel increase in direct vitriol levelled against her sister. This is remarkable, as first


giving the date and cause of Mary’s death, he closes her story in the 1563 edition with what is in fact an anti-climactic simplicity, serving as little more than an entrée to praise of the new queen: And thus letting queen Mary go, without any further description of her lyfe and condicions, I will by the grace of Christ turne now my penne to enter to the flourishing and peacable tyme of the virtuous and long wished for Quene Elizabeth. In the 1570 edition on the other hand, Foxe expands on Mary’s death, taking the opportunity to excoriate her (and then her joint persecutors) rather than move into praise of Elizabeth. Identifying what he considers to have been her chief failings, he represents them as evidence of Christ’s own condemnation of her and as a warning of the bad luck that can befall princes who fail to promote true religion. Listing first as proof of God’s displeasure Mary’s military losses, her failure to crown Philip as King of England, her failure to restore monasticism in England, the bad harvests plaguing England during her reign and the loss of Calais, he attacks her on the most personal of grounds, her failure to bear a child: Never worse successe had any woman, then had she in her childbyrth. For seyng one of these two must nedes be graunted, that either she was with child or not with child, if she were with child and did travayle, why was it not seene? If she were not, how was all the Realme deluded? And in the meane while where were all the prayers, the solemne processions, the devout Masses of the Catholicke Clergy? Why did they not prevayle with God, if their Religion were so godly as they pretend? If their Masses Ex opere operato be able to fetch Christ from heaven, and to reach downe to Purgatory, how chaunced then they could not reach to the Queenes chamber, to helpe her in her travaile, if she had bene with child in dede? If not, how then came it to passe, that al the Catholicke Church of England did so erre, and was so depely deceaved? He then suggests that Mary should have realized that her infertility was a sign of God’s wrath, and that her failure to register this and change her ways resulted in God’s continued punishment: Queene Mary, after these manifold plagues and corrections, which might sufficiently admonish her of Gods disfavour provoked


agaynst her, would not yet cease her persecution, but still continued more and more to revenge her Catholicke zeale upon the Lordes faithfull people, settyng fire to their poore bodyes by dozens & halfedozens together. Wherupon Gods wrathfull indignation increasing more and more agaynst her ceased not to touch her more nere with private misfortunes and calamities. For after that he had taken from her the fruite of children (which chiefly and above all thinges she desired) then he bereft her of that, which of all earthly thinges should have bene her chiefe stay of honour, and staffe of her comfort, that is, withdrew from her the affection and company even of her owne husband, by whose Mariage she had promised before to her selfe whole heapes of such joy and felicitie: but now the omnipotent governour of all thinges so turned the wheele of her own spinnyng agaynst her, that her high buildinges of such joyes and felicities, came all to a Castlecome-down, her hopes being confounded, her purposes disappointed, and she now brought to desolation: who seemed neither to have the favour of God, nor the hartes of her fubjectes, nor yet the love of her husband: who neither had fruite by him while she had him, neither could now enjoy him whom she had maried, neither yet was in libertie to mary any other whom she might enjoy. Marke here (Christian reader) the wofull adversitie of this Queene, and learne withall, what the Lord can do when mans wilfulnes will needes resiste him, and will not be ruled. 53 When, Foxe concludes, ‘all these fayre admonitions would take no place with the Queene, nor move her to revoke her bloody lawes’, God took even more drastic action: ‘It so pleased the Maiesty of almightie god, when no other remedy would serve, by death to cut her of, which in her life so little regarded the life of others.’ Mary was a deeply unhappy woman, which Foxe acknowledges. However, he argues, this was her own fault and serves as evidence that she was opposed to God, wilfully resisting him, refusing to be ruled by him. She was not unlucky, misled, badly advised, but personally responsible for the persecution of God’s people and thus personally condemned by God to suffer for her crimes. Foxe firmly establishes Mary’s personal opposition to God, her own culpability and thus her status as outside God’s church – she was, as Dryver claims, Jezebel the promiscuous idolater, a member of the false church of Antichrist. This diatribe does not appear until the 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, and it all but closes this edition, replacing the account of


the Elizabethan Settlement and the panegyric to the new queen that closes the first. While the newly framed account of Anne Askew in the 1570 edition, as Freeman and Wall argue,54 points to the dangers to the realm of incomplete reform, the paragraphs all but closing the edition also serve as a warning to Elizabeth of her subordination and duty to God (which is also particularly emphasized in the new, less effusive dedication in this edition), of her personal responsibility for pursuing reform, of her culpability if she should fail to do so and of the sort of punishment she can expect if she resists God – if, like her sister, she refuses to be ruled by him. Implicating Mary herself in the evils of her reign, rather than her counsellors alone, by establishing the prince herself as opposing God, contributes to the justifiability of the disobedience shown her by her martyrs–men and women who serve as models not for daily living, but for disobedience to anti-Christian authority: authority – secular authority – that would demand idolatry. While the Acts and Monuments, by its very nature a record of persecution, depicts the defiance of godly martyrs refusing to obey the laws imposed by a ruler who has subjected herself, her church and her country to the papacy, by 1570 Foxe was faced with the task of creating models for disobedience, not just to popery – firmly established years before he produced his great work as the religion of Antichrist – but even to a body less clearly marked than the papal church as the false church: an English church headed by an English Protestant prince fully independent of Rome, but still requiring its members to uphold traditions antithetical to God’s laws. To do this, he amplified his rhetoric by drawing the true church as a congregation clearly distinct from the visible one, be it Elizabeth’s or the pope’s, a church made up of individuals: again, Christ’s poor, persecuted flock, who prioritize God’s laws as revealed in the New Testament above any laws made by men – bishops or even princes. ‘For’, he insists in the new first preface opening his second edition, ‘like as is the nature of truth: so is the proper condition of the true Church, that commonly none seeth it, but such only as be the members and partakers therof. And therefore they which require that Gods holy Church should be evident and visible to the whole world seem to define the great Synagoge of the world, rather than the true spirituall Church of God.’ 55 Unlike Augustine’s two cities, Foxe’s division of the world into the saved and the damned includes a category of ‘gospeller’ in the latter group, nominally obedient to the Protestant Christ, living and worshipping outside the dominions of the Roman Antichrist, but not a member of the true church, and so by definition a member of the false.


This is the ‘carnal gospeller’, and in England, as everywhere else, he is the majority: The world I call all such as be without or against Christ, eyther by ignoraunce not knowing him, or by heathnyshe life not following him, or by violence resisting him. On the other side, the kingdome of Christ in this world I take to be all them which belonge to the fayth of Christ, and here take his part in thys world agaynst the world. The number of whom although it be muche smaller than the other, and alwayes, lightlye is hated and molested of the world, yet it is the number which the Lorde peculiarlye doth blesse and prosper, and ever will. And thys number of Christ’s subiectes is it, which we call the visible church here in earth. Which visible church, having in it self a difference of. ii. sortes of people, so is it to be devided in. ii. parts, of which the one standeth of such as be of outward profession onely, the other which by election inwardly are ioyned to Christ: the first in word and lippes seemeth to honour Christ, and are in the visible church onely, but not in the church invisible, and partaketh the outward sacramentes of Christ, but not the inwarde blessing of Christ: The other are both in the visible, and also in the invisible church of Christ, which not in woordes onely and outward profession, but also in hart do truely serve and honour Chist, partaking not onely in the sacraments, but also in the heavenly blessings and grace of Christ. 56 The visible church is populated with carnal gospellers, one of whom, it is not too much to say, Foxe must by 1570 have considered, with her vestments and crucifixes, Elizabeth herself. When the laws of her church contradict the laws of Christ, members of the true church distinguish themselves by ‘truly serving and honouring Christ’, putting him before the world and thus before man-made laws. During Mary’s reign, as suggested above, her Protestant exiles developed theories justifying all manner of political resistance, extending from simple disobedience to more violent confrontation and even to regicide, treatises at times actively advocating her assassination. This marks a dramatic shift from a Protestant – and Edwardian – discourse condemning resistance to princely authority, in arguments based primarily on Romans 13, 57 a ‘considerable body of what might be termed the literature of obedience’.58 The first Marian exile to theorize justifiable resistance to Mary was our old friend John Bale, whose Faithful Admonition of a Certain True Pastor (1554) is in large part a translation of


a section of Luther’s Warning to his Dear German People, prefaced by calls for resistance by Philip Melanchton and Bale himself. As Gerry Bowler notes, Bale crafts a transition from disobedience to anti-Christian laws to legal, active defence of true religion, arguing that resistance for God’s sake is not disobedience. As would all the writers that followed him, Bale poses such resistance as true obedience to a higher law than the magistrate’s.59 Bale spotlights the dangers of foreign domination and the threat to the ancient privileges of the English, combining political concerns with more purely spiritual ones. He addresses his appeal to all classes of Englishmen, but does not ask the commons to rise. Rather, his goal is to prepare them to support a leader who he hopes will emerge to depose Mary. Most writers following Bale, however, after establishing the need to resist Mary, radically depart from continental models by attempting to galvanize private citizens to violent resistance. This they do by theorizing that all true believers in Christ and his laws are compelled not just to disobey anti-Christian laws attempting to force them into idolatry, but actively to resist anti-Christian magistracy. The anonymous Certain Questions Demanded and asked by the Noble Realm of England (1555), like Bale’s tract addressing political and religious concerns, draws on the Old Testament to become the first of the exile works to do this, challenging Mary’s right as a woman to rule, at the same time damning her as a traitor for her attempt to deliver England into the power of a foreign prince. 60 John Ponet’s A Short Treatise of Politike Power and of the True Obedience which Subjects owe Kings (1556), which argues that civil government was established by God to maintain justice and benefit the commonwealth, calls for limits to the ruler’s power to command and to the subject’s duty to obey: specifically, princes cannot expect obedience when their commands run counter to the laws of God or nature. Any order violating God’s law must be disobeyed, as must any that would violate justice or harm the commonwealth, as a subject’s loyalty must be to his country rather than strictly to his prince. In the case of a manifest tyrant like Mary, institutions such as the judiciary and nobility should offer correction, but when they fail in their duties – as they have in the present case, due to their avarice and greed – tyrannicide is the only answer: thus Ponet calls for Mary’s assassination by a private man with ‘som special inwarde commaundement or surely proved mocion of God’. 61 Christopher Goodman’s 1558 work, How Superior Powers ought to be Obeyed, similarly puts power in the hands of the individual Christian, but whereas Ponet draws in part on constitutional arguments,


Goodman bases his argument wholly on scripture. The English are obliged, like the Old Testament Israelites, to slay all idolaters: not just Mary, but also her clergy should be butchered. Knox, Goodman’s fellow member of the radical congregation at Geneva, echoes some of his ideas in The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), in which, like Goodman, he uses biblical precept to attack female rule. Mary, like Athalia, must be murdered in a rebellion led by inferior magistrates. Failing that, the people have the right to use violence to defend themselves from godless tyranny.62 Foxe himself penned an appeal for help against Mary in 1557, in which he exhorts the English nobility to restrain both the queen and her clergy for the sake of true religion and the commonwealth. Notably abandoning any suggestion of action either by private men or the commons more broadly, Foxe’s arguments largely resemble Bale’s. Though they depart from each other in their suggestions for a present cure to the English ‘plague’, both men emphasize the threat to England of foreign domination; both castigate the nobility for ineffectiveness, indolence and confessional hypocrisy; and both suggest that the nobility are obliged to stand between the monarchy and tyranny. Along these lines, Foxe adopts the argument that the English nobility are themselves representative of the divine on earth (divinae cujusdam potentiae vicariam nobis imaginem repraesentans in terries), and that only they can intervene to stop the pitiless persecutions in England and to protect England from papal dominion. Foxe also appeals to Mary herself, but in doing so insists that she has misused the sword given to her by God: she is using it against the wrong people. Rather than those whom she has so greatly persecuted (quos tantopere persequeris), she should be ridding the kingdom of those who violate the religion of God while also infesting (infestant) the realm: murderers, adulterers, mercenaries, perjurers, blasphemers, idolaters, procurers and rebels. Foxe’s explicit agenda, like Bale’s, is both to condemn the English nobility for having failed thus far during Mary’s reign to live up to their constitutional duties and to do what his fellow exiles seem to have despaired of, to exhort them now, at long last, to act. The best constitutions are designed, he argues, to prevent the tyranny of immoderate monarchs, by providing for a sharing of legitimate authority between the monarch and the senatoriam nobilitatem. The nobles have a duty to advise their prince, but they also have a share in ruling, and they should stand, in their public role, against the murder of innocents and against the imposition in England of both idolatry and foreign power. Foxe does not exhort the nobles explicitly to rebellion, but he repeat-


edly uses the imperative agite – act – in his prose, emphasizing again and again the need for immediate action of some sort: ‘Now is the time’, he warns, and if religion alone fails to provide them with motivation to act, then danger to the commonwealth should, if this is the only thing that can bring them to resist (velitis).63 Imagine, he laments, if Turks or Scythians had invaded England and committed the crimes presently being perpetrated in the name of Rome. What would the nobles have done then? The nobles have become complicit, muttering in corners, flattering the queen, afraid to stand or to speak the truth, and, most importantly, for the sake of private fear, sacrificing the public good. Like Ponet, Foxe draws on both biblical and constitutional arguments to exhort the nobility to action, but he does not, like Ponet, go so far as to call for Mary’s assassination: he is subtle, and it is unclear to what extent his call for action might have been intended (or not) to resonate as a call to active resistance by the nobility. Certainly, his treatise was not intended for popular reading – he does not want a private citizen to assassinate the queen – and it is telling that, unlike most of the resistance treatises emerging from the English exile community, his is written and published in Latin. Nevertheless, however judicious, Ad Inclytos is clearly a plea for action. The nobles, those ‘most illustrious heroes’, are asked not just to advise Mary, but to come together as one, to stand between her persecution and its victims and to save their country ‘in this time of such great and deeply felt necessity’. 64 While Foxe did not attempt to raise the political wrath of the commons during his exile, the Acts and Monuments describes, and in English, the constancy, heroism and clear disobedience of all manner of men and women. While disobedience for the sake of resisting idolatry is a necessary ingredient in all Christian martyrology – Catholic or Protestant – Protestantism had redrawn the swords of authority, creating, in the process, a religion of obedience to magistracy. As we have seen, English and Scottish theorists (and, to an extent, continental reformers) had developed resistance theory from their Christocentric theology during the troubled 1550s, but with Elizabeth’s accession came the privileging of the cult of obedience: disobedience to ecclesiastical authority could only constitute disobedience to the monarch. Foxe wrestled with this problem, one embedded in the tension between two Anglo-Protestant visions of the church: one as an invisible, scattered flock, the other as a visible, national institution. Adding to the tension between the two churches is the person of the monarch, whether Protestant or Catholic, and the belief still dominating Protestant


thought – whatever the anger of the Marian exiles – that princes, even bad ones, were appointed by God. The difficulty for Protestants reconciling themselves to disobedience is beautifully articulated in a Marian document appearing in the Acts and Monuments, ‘A certaine godly supplication exhibited by certaine inhabitants of the county of Norfolke’, which articulates both the belief in subjects’ duty to obey secular authority and the principle that obedience to God must supersede all other obedience. Foxe, as will be recalled, set himself the task of indicting Mary herself for her crimes in the second edition of his history, and this agenda makes its way into his framing of the ‘godly supplication’. While it appears unadorned in the 1563 edition, unaccompanied by shouldernotes, Foxe annotates it heavily in the 1570 edition, using notes to guide interpretation. 65 One result of this is to deflect attention from the supplication’s repeated exoneration of Mary from guilt for her government’s religious policies, while allowing the authors’ rationalization of godly disobedience to remain intact. Foxe introduces the supplication by proposing that ‘it was not to be omitted, nor unworthy here to be placed, in consideration of the fruite which thereof myght ensue to the Reader’.66 The piece itself, a protest against the Marian religious injunctions, begins – using the tried and true Romans 13 – by acknowledging, and even arguing for, the obligation of Christians to obey all those superiour powers, whom God hath appointed over us, doing as S. Paule saith: Let every soule be subiect to the superiour powers. For there is no power but of God: but those powers that are, are ordained of God. Wherefore, whosoever resisteth the powers, the same resisteth God, and they that resist, get themselves judgement. However, while the authority of princes and their officers is no ‘tirannicall usurpation’, and to obey such authority is to obey God, as Christians its authors find themselves bound by their promise made at baptism to ‘preferre Gods honour in all thinges’. No obedience that fails to agree wholly with God’s word can be considered ‘true and perfect’. 67 The supplication moves on to attempt to rationalize this apparent contradiction between the absolute command to obedience to superior powers and the position articulated that, in the present circumstance, such obedience was not true obedience by suggesting that the commandment issued from the Crown demanding the ‘restitution of the late abolished latin service’ constitutes not only an overthrow of true


religion but also a subversion of regal power in England. Thus, it argues, the wicked commandment cannot have come from the queen herself, ‘but rather from some other, abusing the Queenes goodnes and favour, and studying to worke some feate against the Quene, her crowne, and the realme, to please with it the Romaine bishop’. ‘We’, the authors insist, ‘cannot have so evill an opinion of her Maiestye, that she would subvert the most godly & holy religion’ herself. At any rate, neither the queen nor her lesser magistracy will purchase for the authors ‘a pardon of Christ’ if they commit the sins and blasphemies demanded by the new religious laws. The supplication goes on at length to detail the ways in which the return of popery constitutes a subversion of true religion, using biblical precepts to reiterate the argument that princes and magistrates ‘are not truely obeyed when God is disobeyed, nor yet disobeyed when God is faythfully obeyed’.68 The authors of the supplication carefully remove Mary from the problem of their disobedience: she surely cannot be held responsible for the new religious laws; thus disobedience to them (which in any case does not really constitute disobedience, but obedience to God) does not amount to disobedience towards her, but rather to those who have taken advantage of her. Foxe, however, in his editing of the supplication in 1570, brings Mary firmly back into the equation, assuring the reader that the religious laws were hers. Against the passage, for example, in which the authors insist that the return of popery constitutes a ‘subversion of the regal power’, and then go on to protest that the wicked commandment cannot have come from the queen herself, Foxe attaches the comment, ‘Queene Maryes Iniunctions disagreeing from Gods word, how and wherein’,69 continuing to tag the document with similar comments: ‘Gods word and true religion cast out of the church in Q. Maryes time’;70 ‘Queen Maryes authority, striving agaynst menss consciences’.71 As an indication of how Foxe’s comments can diverge from the text they attach to, this latter note accompanies the authors’ assertion that ‘wee trust the Queenes gracious and merciful hart will not suffer such tyranny to be done’. While the authors of the supplication carefully remove Mary from culpability for the injunctions delivered in her name, Foxe, as in his later description of her woes, will have none of it. By establishing Mary’s direct responsibility for the hated laws forcing her subjects into disobedience, Foxe also affirms that by disobeying those laws her godly subjects were disobeying her, their prince, in order to obey God. The implications of this had the potential to extend beyond its possible impact on the thought of educated divines, to


threaten the foundations of a society resting on belief in order, social and political hierarchy, rank and obedience. The make-up of Foxe’s community of martyrs, transcending class, gender and education, as well as its delivery in English, had the intended effect of driving home the Protestant ideal of a ‘priesthood of all believers’, opening up the true church to a membership based, as Felch has argued, on the believer’s belief and election rather than on worldly status. But the work also had more political implications, and it is no accident that by 1570 Foxe was directing his appeal to godliness not to the learned, and not even to the queen, but instead to the ‘true congregation’, wherever and whoever its members might be. Some of these had, in the 1560s, likened their own persecution to the sufferings of the Marian martyrs, but in 1570 Foxe gave them a new model of godly disobedience, one whose defiance of Marian law manifested itself in a clearly articulated and justified rejection of the primary symbol of ordered society and patriarchal authority: the husband. The woman of Cornwall called ‘Prestes wife’ makes a brief appearance in the 1563 edition of the Acts and Monuments as one of the last victims of the Marian persecution. In 1563, Foxe describes her conversion to Protestantism, through the preaching of the Word during Mary’s reign (‘albeit it was in those daies very seldom preached any where’), and her decision to devote herself to prayer and banish from her life ‘all the popish dregges of superstition’. Her neighbours noticed this change in her and, ‘as the cruel serpent’, turned her name over to ‘certayne Justices of the shier’ who, ‘very glad of such occasion’, sent for her and examined her of her belief about the sacrament of the altar. Prest freely confessed to her faith and was imprisoned in Launceton, from where she was sent to Exeter to undergo examination by two churchmen, Blackstone and, in this edition, Dr Reynolds, dean of Exeter Cathedral. Blackstone, chancellor to the Bishop of Exeter, (as he will in the second edition) subjects Prest to interviews before his concubine, before returning her to prison. She is delivered to the secular power, which burns her: ‘in great contempt of the truth (which she most constantly confessed) they consumed her carkas immediatly with fyer into ashes: which she very patiently suffered. & most ioyfully receyved, yelding her soule and lyfe to the Lorde and her body to the tormentors, for the which the Lords name therefore be praysed. Amen.’ 72 The story of Prest’s wife changes dramatically in the 1570 edition. Now she is shown answering to examinations, of which, as I discuss in chaper 4, Foxe admits he has no transcripts, not before the lesser clergy


as in the first edition (Blackstone and Reynolds) but instead before the Bishop of Exeter, who makes no appearance in the earlier edition.73 It is here that we learn of her abandonment of her husband and children, prompted by her receipt of ‘a certeine motion and a feelyng of singular comfort’ brought on by prayer, and it is here that Foxe spotlights both her gender and her simplicity.74 Her disobedience has implications well beyond the disobedience of a man in her situation, partly because a woman’s temerity by definition tended to her discredit in early modern England, but more importantly because of her disobedience to her husband, which the reader learns nothing of in the first edition, but which she articulates in the second with pride. Early modern men and women considered women’s disobedience of their husbands symbolic of social disorder, and, as much recent scholarship has shown, communities often imposed extra-judicial but severe correction on families in which the gender order had been seen to break down. 75 The intersection of ideas about gender with anxiety about social order, so evident in the print culture of the period as well as in surviving court records, is central to much recent research, including a number of studies of early modern England, which make it clear that while the Protestant promotion of marriage purported to improve attitudes to women, according to reformers and some modern scholars, it was also considered the best way to keep them under control in communities consumed with the desire for stability and godliness. 76 Marital order was also, however, rigidly and legally enforced as being in the interest of the state, such that in both the Protestant and Catholic early modern West, the interests of family, local community and state intersected in its pursuit.77 Household government together with male authority operated to ensure political and social order, while at the same time contributing to the justification of the sovereign power of the ruler. As Susan Amussen has shown for early modern England, and Julie Hardwick for France, ‘the symbiotic relationship between husband/father and family and ruler and kingdom’ informed the ordering of households, such that men’s authority over their wives, servants and children was analogous to that of kings over their realms and subjects.78 Necessarily orderly individual households were considered the building blocks – the smallest units – of orderly society, and order was reliant on the perceived stability of men’s authority over women and other dependants.79 A challenge to male authority within marriage was thus, symbolically, tantamount to a challenge to both royal authority and social order.80


Foxe’s enlargement of his narrative of Prest’s testimony in the 1570 Acts and Monuments constitutes a call to the godly, wherever and whoever they may be, to defy authority, like that of Prest’s husband, that would lead them into idolatry or deny them their right to hear godly preaching. Bishop Troubleville of Exeter’s opening words to her – ‘Thou foolish woman … Fie for shame. Thou an unlearned person and a woman’ – delivered as they are from the mouth of a persecutor for the false church, are discredited and shown up as ridiculous, as the unlearned person and woman in question proceeds to speak God’s wisdom, which she has learned despite attempts by men like him to eradicate God’s Word from the realm. How has she learned her wisdom? From preachers spreading the word despite risk of persecution, much as they were doing during in 1560s Elizabethan England: ‘Lo,’ says the bishop, ‘she hath heard prattling among these new preachers, or heard some pevish booke.’ ‘No,’ Prest counters, ‘that I have learned was of godly preachers, and of godly bookes which I have heard read.’ ‘But’, says the bishop, ‘if thou were an honest woman, thou wouldest not have left thine husband & children, and runne about the countrey like a fugitive … Belike then you are a good housewife, to flye from your husband and also from the church.’ ‘My houswifry is but small,’ she replies, ‘but God geve me the grace to go to the true Church.’ ‘The true Church?’ asks the bishop: What doest thou mean?’ Prest responds, ‘where iii. or iiii. are gathered together in the name of God, to that Church will I go as long as I live’. ‘Then,’ says Troubleville, ‘you have a Church of your own. Well, let this mad woman be put downe to prison, untill we send for her husband.’ ‘No,’ says Prest, ‘I have but one husband, which is here already in this Citie and in prison with me, from whom I will never depart.’ 81 Prest’s defence of her faith, and particularly her stated relationship with preaching, sermons, godly books and what she calls the true church, is challenged by the Bishop of Exeter with a combination of ridicule and reiteration of her husband’s authority. Like his other challenges – in particular his dismissal of her ability to understand and, more importantly, her authority to understand the Word of God – his appeal to her duty to her husband, who by law and custom should rule her, loses its legitimacy under Foxe’s pen. Prest not only admits to the smallness of her ‘housewifry’ – indeed, she has abandoned it altogether – but when she does so she immediately elides the implications of this by her affirmation of her membership in the true church. In one discrete line she states, ‘My houswifry is but small: but god geve me grace to go to the true church.’ By leaving one realm or city under


which she is in subjection to patriarchal, earthly authority, she enters another, the true church. Faced with Prest’s true church, made up of tiny congregations, surreptitious preaching and an internal, intimate and spiritual faith, Troubleville’s understanding of authority and of the church itself, like the understanding of bishops opposing Puritan preaching in Elizabeth’s England, is confounded. Confused, like Pornapolis and Pseudamnus before Ecclesia in Christus Triumphans, he asks: ‘What doest thou mean?’ While Foxe never remarks on Anne Askew’s separation from her husband in the Acts and Monuments, his failure or choice not to comment on her marriage cannot be interpreted as disapproval. Thomas Freeman has described the way Foxe, departing from Bale – his source for most of his papal history – who levelled as many accusations as possible against as many popes as possible, ‘seems, like a careful gardener, to have pruned his material so that each pope would be associated with a particular type of sin’.82 Askew, like Alexander VI (the murderer) and Julius III (the glutton and blasphemer) had her purpose in the Acts and Monuments, a purpose to which her separation from her husband was irrelevant. Foxe, on the other hand, goes much further than necessary in celebrating the abandonment of her husband by Prest’s wife, even if his presentation of her testimony with regard to the matter resembles reality, which is doubtful. As discussed earlier in this book, he explicitly celebrates her separation from her husband as well as her perception of her earthly marriage as antithetical to her membership in the true church, conceived of by her as marriage to Christ. To Prest’s words, ‘But now standing here as I do (sayd she) in the cause of Christ and his truth, where I must either forsake Christ, or my husband, I am contented to to sticke onely to Christ my heavenly spouse, and renounce the other’, he responds in a shoulder-note, guiding his reader, ‘The wife renouncing her husband for Christes sake.’ As Askew, the Henrician noblewoman, represents in the 1570 Acts and Monuments a warning to the Virgin Queen of the consequences of failing to complete reformation, Prest serves as an explicit model for disobedience and the rejection of earthly authority by godly men and women of any rank and despite gender. Natalie Davis broke ground in reading the implications of problematic gendered imagery in 1965, famously arguing that the disorderly, even carnivalesque ‘woman on top’ topos served, in early modern France, to widen behavioural options for women and to sanction political resistance to unjust rule for both sexes. 83 Joy Wiltenburg has more recently traced the conflation in early modern street literature between


women’s escape from male control and their own subversive power.84 While Wiltenburg argues that such literature, describing women’s ‘licentious urge for dominance’, reflects male anxieties about the success of patriarchal rule, Foxe’s heroines, while neither comic nor grotesque like the female figures examined by Davis, validate the right of women to ‘rise up and tell the truth’.85 As women who do this, they are also emblematic, as inversions of obedient womanhood, like Davis’s carnivalesque women, of the right to resist unjust rule. While the woman martyr’s disobedience to religious authority is predictable in martyrology, the justification and even celebration of Prest’s disobedience towards her husband challenges more than the institutions of false religion. Nikki Shepardson has recently argued that in his portrayals of female martyrdom in Histoire des vrays tesmoins, published in the same year as Foxe’s second edition of the Acts and Monuments, Jean Crespin worked out the tension between the conflicting needs for subversion and order within the persecuted French Huguenot movement. He did this by reconstructing, in his martyrology, women’s martyrdoms such that they ‘were seen as still supporting and illustrating the gendered ideology of Calvinism’, one that taught obedience as women’s route to salvation. Foxe does not do this. There is no equivalent to Prest’s wife in Crespin’s martyrology. As Shepardson points out, when faced with a female martyr like Marguerite Le Riche, who in life left her husband (in her case temporarily) rather than be bodily carried to Easter Mass, Crespin takes care both to elide reference to her husband from the point of her arrest – thus also eliding any articulated clash of obligation between Le Riche’s domestic duties and her duty to God – and to assure his reader of her constant devotion to her family. 86 Le Riche, unlike Prest, does not express contempt for her family, nor does Crespin, like Foxe, celebrate her abandonment of her family. Foxe’s Prest, on the other hand, very unlike Crespin’s Le Riche, but like the disorderly female characters described by Wiltenburg, is politically threatening. Her dramatic declaration, ‘God forbid that I should lose the lyfe eternall for this carnall and short lyfe … I will never turne from my heavenly husband to my earthly husband: from the fellowship of Aungels to mortall children’, while serving to subjugate her to a patriarchal if heavenly marital authority, at the same time proclaims a rejection, if necessary, of the system of order and control enshrined, presumably, in Foxe’s own gendered theology, and supporting obedience to royal authority. In this, it is provocatively reminiscent of Ponet’s promise in his Marian justification of political resistance, one


appropriate to those who have, like Prest, experienced a ‘motion of God’: ‘ye shalbe sure also to make a chaunge from your earthly countrey, to the heavenly Paradise … from the company of men, to the feloweship of Angelles.’87 Foxe’s celebration of Prest’s defiance effectively justifies disobedience to political authority when such authority demands betrayal of Christ by members of his ‘true’ church. While using a woman’s disobedience to her husband in this way, however, he simultaneously perpetuates an ideal of wifely submission to a family patriarch consistent with contemporary views regarding female virtue. His disorderly women martyrs are ultimately subordinate to a new husband, married to them through the covenant of the New Testament, in their election: their rejection of earthly authority, including that of their earthly husbands (and thus monarch), proves their abject self-abnegation, their obedience to their heavenly spouse. The faithfulness of the woman martyr to Christ thus does have the effect of reconciling her social disorderliness to her feminine virtue: in Bale’s construction, it earns her white robes, making her a virgin, if not physically intact. In Foxe’s, the white robes become wedding garments, making her a bride of Christ, but one very unlike her adolescent, unmarried, pre-Reformation sister, whose status derives from her commitment to perpetual physical virginity. Not intended as models of female behaviour, Foxe’s disorderly female martyrs neither, ultimately, symbolize opposition to the ethic of female obedience within marriage, for in their white robes, in earthly terms, they are unmarried, and in heavenly terms obedient within marriage, even when righteously disobedient to earthly authority. Nevertheless, it is likely that while most women reading Foxe were merely edified by the example of his suffering female martyrs, some saw Askew, Prest and their female fellows as examples for emulation of women preaching, prophesying, wandering and even leaving their husbands in the name of their faith, women perhaps including the seventeenth-century prophetess Anne Wentworth. Keith Thomas has noted the similarity between the accusations of wantonness following Askew, and those levelled more than 100 years later against Wentworth, whose separation from her husband exacerbated the problem of her ‘delirious verse’.88 It is virtually inconceivable that Wentworth, a literate, persecuted religious radical, had not read Foxe’s stories of Tudor martyrdom, at least in abridgement, but however much accusations against her resembled accusations against Askew, it is Prest’s words, again so reminiscent of Ponet’s subversive text, that are echoed in her self-defence: ‘It was necessary for the peace of my soul, to absent my self from my earthly Husband, in obedience to my Heavenly Bridegroom.’89

7 Conclusion

In the Acts and Monuments, Foxe eulogized as martyrs a number of women who at first glance it would seem neither he nor his godly associates would have wanted as wives. Engaging in long, complex debate, resisting and mocking male authority, developing intimate, if presumably spiritual, extra-marital relationships, dominating, disobeying and even leaving their husbands, these women, as Protestant icons, defy historiographical expectations when it comes to early modern ideas about virtuous female behaviour. But Foxe did not design these women to serve as models of virtuous behaviour for living female members of a godly community; rather, as characters in an historical and cosmic drama described in Bale’s Image of Both Churches and Foxe’s Christus Triumphans, they are models for disobedience to authority, whether marital, ecclesiastical or royal. Such authority had in the past, and could still, demand idolatry in worship and thus, for the elect member of the true church, adultery. In such circumstances members of the true church had to choose between obedience to earthly authority and fidelity to Christ, to whom, in election, they were married. The construct of the Christian church as Christ’s spouse was not new in the sixteenth century, and it was not the invention of the Protestant Reformation. However, unlike the medieval Ecclesia, Foxe’s true church had no tangible earthly existence: an image associated in the Middle Ages with the carnality of Christ, both her association with sacramental blood and her semiotic identification with the visible church disappear in Foxe’s rhetoric, as it had before him in Bale’s. The bride of Christ whose membership the elect, as a group and as individuals, embody, is spiritual, invisible and, importantly, persecuted by earthly authority. If this was clear to Bale, Foxe and their fellow English reformers in the Henrician 1540s, surviving as 160

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a construct during the years of Erastian, ‘godly’ Edwardianism, it was driven home for them during Mary’s reign; the ascendancy of a ‘Protestant’ monarch herself reluctant to pursue complete reform – and more and more clearly reluctant as the 1560s passed – did not affect its change. The true church was still scattered and persecuted, and its persecutor, whether in ‘Protestant’ England or ‘Catholic’ France or Spain, was still Antichrist. As Foxe puts it in the opening paragraphs of the first book of the 1570 Acts and Monuments, ‘sometime the true church of Christ hath no greater enemyes, than of theyr own profession and company’.1 By 1570, it was a moot point whether or not the Roman church, in its claims to Christianity, was of the ‘profession and company’ of the true church. Rome was by now a clear enemy whose identity as Antichrist was beyond dispute. But Antichrist had many faces, and the early Elizabethan Puritans protesting ceremonialism and vestments in the English church selfconsciously continued to pose themselves against him, as they had when fighting and demanding disobedience and even resistance to Mary. Under these circumstances, disobedience to the monarch – a monarch heading both church and state – continued to be a real or potential necessity, and within a system according to which household authority worked both to reinforce monarchic power and to justify it, disobedient wives served as potent symbols. Often brutally corrected at the popular level within local communities, marital disobedience, necessarily undermining of social order, also undermined political order and was seen as threatening to a system built on entrenched notions of gender and class hierarchy. Foxe’s disorderly women martyrs thus serve not as models for virtuous female behaviour, but as models for disobedience – they are politically dangerous symbols, and while Foxe was conscious of accusations levelled by Catholic polemicists that Protestantism taught women to disobey their husbands (if Miles Huggarde understood the implications of this, so did Foxe and his fellow reformers) he nevertheless depicted them disobeying their husbands, and did so with relish. In a sense the extent to which this is so could arguably be mitigated by the fact that the Acts and Monuments is by its very nature a record of disobedience – the sine qua non of persecution. However, women’s disobedience had more profound implications than men’s – any men’s – and while Foxe may have conceived of the true invisible church as a place of equality among members, it would be a proto-feminist Foxe indeed who believed that in the eyes of the world men’s disobedience and women’s – to royal authority or marital – carried equal symbolic weight.


However, there is a sense in which Foxe’s male and female martyrs do enjoy equal status. As Bale had done in the first two English Protestant martyrologies, Sir John Oldcastle’s of 1544 and Anne Askew’s of 1546–7, Foxe drew his female and male martyrs as equal in confession and in strength before persecution. While not pretending for them an equality of body, learning or socio-political status in life, the Acts and Monuments, like Bale’s martyrology, portrays all martyrs as lambs battling wolves, equal in sometimes being imperfect, equal in needing and receiving God’s assistance to stand to martyrdom, and equal in – and by – confession of his word. While Foxe arguably portrayed as martyrs male and female, highborn and low, because such was the make-up of the community of martyrs whose persecution he set himself the task of describing, to the extent that he emphasized gender and social difference, his purpose was not to reconcile women’s gender to their constancy or even to their subversive actions, but to spotlight the indiscriminate cruelty of the persecution of Antichrist. While we can chafe at some of Foxe’s terms, blanching, for example, at the rhetorical displacement in ‘poore sely women’ of ‘wyvish hartes’ by ‘manly stomache’, we should not allow our discomfort with such language to dominate our analysis. The typical woman and even female martyr might have been, according to Foxe’s prejudices (and those of his contemporaries), physically weaker and less learned than her male counterpart, but it is misleading to suggest either that he consistently exhibits such prejudices in his narratives of female martyrdom – indeed, he does not more often than he does – or that his use of a ‘strength-in-weakness’ paradigm mitigates the subversive tendencies of his stories of female martyrdom: a paradigm also used, as it was by Bale before him, in his portrayals of male martyrdom. Steven Mullaney has argued that the agenda informing Foxe’s inclusion of women martyrs in the Acts and Monuments was to ‘produce or at least to help catalyse a corporate national and Protestant body that is as inclusive as possible, not merely composed of learned or high-born but also of the lower orders’. However, Foxe also needed to ‘guard against encouraging further resistance to established authority – especially among those lower orders’. 2 It is here, he suggests, ‘that his treatment of women of differing classes becomes significant’: importantly, his ‘low-born’ women ‘cannot be perceived’ as transgressing social, religious, or gender codes, because their ‘“manlye stomache[s]”’ are bestowed upon them by God; high-born women, on the other hand, like Catherine Parr and Anne Askew, were ‘characteristically given more extended treatment but also more licence in their

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behaviour’. A woman like Elizabeth Young, however, low-born and yet ‘forthright, articulate, sharp-witted, and well-informed about her faith’, falls outside the bounds of the community Foxe seeks to shape, posing a problem, not just for her interrogators, but also for Foxe himself.3 But, in fact, while most of the women martyrs appearing in the Acts and Monuments are low-born and, like most of the male martyrs, described making brief and rather formulaic confessions, mainly responding to articles drawn up by their persecutors and without long scenes of examination, most of the ones represented engaging in long examinations, proving themselves forthright, articulate, sharp-witted and well informed are also low-born. Only one of the more articulate female martyrs, the gentlewoman Anne Askew, is highborn; Catherine Parr, Mullaney’s other example, however clever and hopeful of Reformation, is not, unlike Elizabeth Young, prepared to die for her faith and thus she, unlike Askew and her burning sisters, performs submission to save herself. Foxe’s low-born, forthright, articulate, sharp-witted, well-informed and, most importantly, persecuted women martyrs are types not of virtuous mortal womanhood, or even of godly Elizabethan Protestantism, but of the true persecuted church herself. For the true church is female, Christ’s spouse, boldly, if in fear, risking all for the sake of her husband. Indeed, the misogyny thought by Ellen Macek and Steven Mullaney, for example, to mitigate the subversive potential of Foxe’s women martyrs, instead informs it, just as it informs the image of the true church, itself a politically threatening construct. For the true church is by her very nature a threatening body: invisible to all but herself and her husband, she is defined by her opposition to, and thus persecution by, established authority. Scattered and vulnerable in earthly terms, she serves a higher master than her prince, and while conforming to patriarchal principles in her relationship with him, this itself necessitates her disobedience to earthly authority. Disobedience (and, as such, resistance) is never more subversive than when it comes from those with the least entitlement to it. Thomas Cranmer, with his fame and position, might have been a greater threat to Mary in life than Alice Dryver, but as a symbol for most, like Natalie Davis’s ‘woman on top’, Dryver was much more accessible. The true church is what it is to Bale and Foxe because it is persecuted, and it is persecuted because, like Dryver, it is powerless and yet claims the right to defy earthly authority. Yes, the women martyrs are filled with the Holy Spirit, but so are all members of the true church faced with the consequences of refusing to commit idolatry, despite the demands of the


monarch. Foxe’s male martyrs, as much as his female ones, are also filled with the Holy Spirit, and yet no modern scholar has, to date, been tempted to spotlight his use the strength-in-weakness paradigm to reconcile to their gender the constancy of Robert Glover or Lawrence Saunders. The Holy Spirit apart, however, the women martyrs, like their male counterparts, also owe their wisdom in confession to their own efforts – to reading or listening to the bible, to listening to godly sermons, to worshipping in secret assemblies, to doing the things that Prest’s wife and other members of the true church did during Mary’s reign, and continued to do, very much to Foxe’s knowledge and probably with his participation, during Elizabeth’s: ‘where iii. or iiii. are gathered together in the name of God, to that Church will I go as long as I live.’ 4 The Acts and Monuments came out in five new editions during the century following Foxe’s death in 1587, in 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641 and 1684. The text making the body of the work in these editions remained substantially what it was in Foxe’s own final 1583 edition. This is not the case, however, in the many abridgements of the Acts and Monuments appearing beginning in late sixteenth century, books more accessible to the ordinary consumer than the enormous multi-volume, large-folio editions of the complete work. In 1589, Timothy Bright produced the first Foxe abridgement, a two-volume, quarto edition of 792 pages plus preface and table. 5 This manageable, if still substantial, edition abridges the whole Acts and Monuments in terms of scope, while omitting the lion’s share of its primary documents. Clement Cotton produced the next abridgement, and the most popular of the early modern period, The Mirrour of Martyrs, first published in 1613. 6 A large-print octavo volume of 216 pages, The Mirrour, beginning with John Hooper’s martyrdom and ending with John Bradford’s, is devoted almost exclusively to the Marian martyrs. Thomas Mason produced a more comprehensive abridgement in 1615, Christs Victorie over Sathans Tyrannie, a folio volume of 218 pages.7 While Bright’s Abridgement, Cotton’s Mirrour and Mason’s Christs Victorie are the best known of early modern, post-Foxe Foxes, more followed. The Mirrour itself saw eight editions over the course of the seventeenth century, and the late century would see a veritable flurry of abridgement activity resulting in works like Thomas Mall’s A Cloud of Witnesses (1665), the anonymous Alphabetical Martyrology (1677), Samuel Clarke’s General Martyrologie (1677) and Ellis Hookes’ Spirit of the Martyrs (1682).8 While much modern scholarship has tended to dismiss the subversive potential of Foxe’s women martyrs, Catholic polemicists attack-

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ing Foxe homed in on their disorderly behaviour to discredit them. This is perhaps unsurprising, but notably, during the century following his death, most of Foxe’s abridgers made a point of toning down their erudition and arrogance, and of either glossing over or omitting from their narratives the aspects of their stories most likely to raise eyebrows. Carole Levin has described the development towards the end of the sixteenth century, and more fully over the seventeenth, of the strong, articulate, uncompromising Lady Jane Grey appearing in the Acts and Monuments (and earlier publications of her writings) into ‘the ideal young victim’ of popular mythology, ‘so endearing, especially to the Victorians’. During the imprisonment preceding her execution in 1554, the 16-year-old Grey produced a number of letters and meditations published by Foxe in the Latin and English Acts and Monuments. While in Foxe’s work, although presented as innocent of the treason for which she was ultimately beheaded, Grey emerges as a stubborn, acerbic, even arrogant young woman, within a few decades of her death she had become a model of female virtue: ‘beautiful, modest, deferential, quiet, and passive’. 9 In the development of Grey’s reputation, we can both see the durability of the stories told in Acts and Monuments, and gain insight into their susceptibility to development in appropriation. The sort of ambivalence informing the domestication of Grey is also evident in some renditions and appropriations of Anne Askew, for example, in the late seventeenth-century historian Gilbert Burnet’s suggestion, following his description of her interview before the Privy Council, that ‘some liked the wit and freedom of her discourse, but others thought she was too forward’. 10 While Askew did not enjoy Grey’s continued popularity during the seventeenth century, she remained one of the most notable of the English Protestant martyrs, continuing to appear both in histories of the realm and in more straightforward martyrology. Like Grey’s, Askew’s legacy is mixed, but the two most problematic aspects of her original story – her marriage and her recantation – either disappear or lose their potency in almost all abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, beginning with Bright’s. Bright adopts a narrative voice to tell Askew’s story, retaining nothing of the first-person voice attributed to the martyr herself, offering a summary version of her two sets of examinations, her condemnation and execution. Not only does all reference to her marriage disappear, so do the epistles and meditations comprising much of the Bale and Foxe Examinations. Bright mentions Bonner’s attempt to secure Askew’s recantation, but in his version she never signs the document, and while he repeatedly


refers to Askew’s adept deflection of direct questioning, he fails to make it clear that she ever confessed the faith for which she died, instead focusing on her early strategy of equivocation: ‘she would make no answere’; ‘she would not cast Pearles among swine’; ‘she would declare nothing’; ‘she made such answere as was not to the B. contentment’; she answered in many things parabolically;’ ‘she boldly and roundly (with some checke unto the adversaries) made aunswere in such sort, as they could take no direct vauntage against her’.11 Bright’s method in abridgement is to remove from his text the primary documents taking up so much space in the Acts and Monuments; thus, his transformation of the first-person Askew account into a third-person narrative is consistent with his larger strategy. However, where he departs from the norm in Askew’s story is in his absolute elision of all reference to or reproduction of her erudite confessions of faith. In most cases, while transforming either first-person accounts or examination transcripts into narrative form, Bright quotes his subjects, reverting to first-person voice to allow their expressions of faith. This he does not do in the Askew account: this martyr never expresses her faith, nor does Bright for her. He informs his reader that she was condemned for the article of the real presence in the sacrament, but he never refers to her expression of her own doctrinal heterodoxy: his focus, when it comes to her examinations, is her reticence, albeit in one instance paired with ‘checke’. He also devotes substantial space relative to the rest of his narrative to her torture, reproducing (again exclusively in third-person voice) almost the entirety of her own description of this episode, from there moving on to her execution at which, as in Foxe, his Askew refuses a last-minute pardon (as do her fellow martyrs, ‘by her example’). Bright’s is a dispassionate account, notable chiefly for its elision of the female martyr’s erudition. His Askew is most exceptional for her silence: she is a silent witness, especially under torture. While in Bale and Foxe Askew’s voice dominates – in both the first-person account itself, and in the reproduction of her epistles, meditations and confessions – in Bright she becomes the silent, reticent woman of so much modern scholarship, dying for her faith but never expressing it. As Damian Nussbaum has argued, Bright’s abridgement, produced with the cooperation of Archbishop Whitgift of Canterbury, was intended to serve the established church of England, and, in light of the war with Spain, to shore up a sense of England’s destiny as an elect nation: the individual martyrs are the not the point of his history, but rather their group identity as a corporate, national, visible church. 12

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A number of seventeenth-century abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, however, were designed specifically to focus attention exclusively on the martyrs as exemplary, edifying, prototype Protestants, models of godly behaviour within a Protestant community: these tend to be particularly accessible, easy to read and follow, large in print and small in size. Cotton’s Mirrour, the most popular of all early modern abridgements, is an example of this sort of martyrology. Cotton offers little in the way of doctrine, and much in the way of edifying examples of the speech and behaviour of martyrs already condemned, facing death. Eight of his 57 martyrs are women, and two of these, Grey and Askew, are celebrated only through the presentation of a prayer attributed to them, in Askew’s case the lines ending the block of text appearing in the Acts and Monuments, as in Bale, as ‘The confession of the faith whiche Anne Askewe made in Newgate, before she suffered’. While the confession as it appears in Bale and Foxe is itself an explication of sacramental theology, in which Askew uses scripture to challenge the doctrine of the real presence, its final sentences take the form of a prayer and are reproduced in the Mirrour as ‘the Prayer of Anne Askew’. This begins plaintively, ‘O Lord I have more enemies then there bee haires on my head’, and goes on to ask for God’s help in resisting those who would use ‘vaine words’ to overcome the supplicant, so that she will ‘not set by them’. While her enemies ‘with all spight … fall upon’ her, she hopes that God will forgive them their violence towards her and ‘open also their blind hearts that they may hereafter do that thing in thy sight which is only acceptable before thee … So be it O Lord, so be it.’ 13 Askew’s prayer, while originally attached to an explication not just of faith but also of doctrine, speaks in its isolation her victimization, her love of God and her love, even, of her enemies. It also, importantly, expresses absolute dependence on God for help in resisting her enemies’ words and standing to the violence with which she is afflicted. These themes are echoed in the even more self-effacing prayer, ‘An effectuall Prayer made by the Lady Jane in the time of her trouble’, reproduced to represent Grey in the Mirrour. 14 In this prayer, by far the least expressive of self-sufficiency of her textual remains, Grey bemoans her sinful state, pleads for God’s help in her adversity, begs that he will not allow her to be tempted beyond her power to resist and requests deliverance from the prison of ‘this vilde [sic] masse of claye my sinfull body’. Grey is passive and self-loathing, and awaits death with a mixture of despair and anticipation. Like Askew, she is a pleading victim. These two women’s prayers, in themselves, convey


images of Grey and Askew very different from those emerging in the Acts and Monuments, but Cotton’s emphasis on human sin, divine deliverance and even a desire for death permeates the Mirrour: not only do Askew and Grey lose their learning, the male martyrs also show little evidence of doctrinal erudition: while Cotton’s purpose is certainly to edify, it is not to educate. The difference, however, between Cotton’s treatment of the male martyrs and his treatment of the female ones lies in his unwillingness to present women martyrs in their scenes of death, and in not just his omission of their words, but in his reversal of some of their very identities. His female martyrs neither approach the stake nor die in the flames, but nor do they retain any of the subversive qualities so celebrated in the Acts and Monuments. While the majority of the stories in the Mirrour describe the male martyrs in confrontation either with death or with the idea of death, this is not the case with the few women’s stories, which tend instead to teach constancy and trust in God in the face of material or emotional deprivation, usually revolving around a particular loss suffered during imprisonment, either of family or of food, both traditional symbols of female domesticity. 15 The story of Agnes Bangeor, for example, which finds a place in Cotton’s martyrology, is dominated by her distress over the postponement of her execution, which is particularly difficult since in preparation for it she has already sent away her nursing infant. Her comfort over this arrives in the form of a friend’s comparison of her sacrifice to Abraham’s: ‘have not you done the like in your little sucking babe, which you were content to part with?’16 While Bangeor’s story is ultimately a parable about patience and trust in God, it pivots on the martyr’s identity as a mother and the sacrifice attached to giving up her child. Similarly, while in the Acts and Monuments, Prest’s wife actively rejects her husband and children as idolaters, in the Mirrour her separation from her family loses its context, becoming itself part of her sacrifice. Cotton’s excerpt from her story begins with the Bishop of Exeter’s first question about her family, and her response: I have an husband and Children, and I have them not. So long as I was at libertie, I refused neither husband nor children: but standing here as I doe in the cause of Christ and his truth, where I must eyther forsake Christ, or my husband, I am content to sticke onely to Christ my spirituall Husbnd, and to forsake the other.17 This answer also appears in the Acts and Monuments, but Foxe’s reader knows that Prest has voluntarily left her family well before her arrest,

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and that the ‘libertie’ she refers to here means a freedom from idolatry. Liberty from prison, in Foxe, would not mean reunion with her family, a family intent on forcing her into idolatry, but Cotton frames her answer such that prison itself seems the barrier between the woman and her husband and children. ‘Libertie’, here a state of physical freedom in which in which she does not refuse them, is the opposite not of idolatry, but of imprisonment: Cotton’s reader has no sense that Prest has previously rejected her family. The Bishop’s question and Prest’s answer almost complete Cotton’s version of her story, but tacked to the end of it is the following sentence: ‘Beeing oft-times offred money to relieve her necessities, shee would for the most part refuse it, saying, That she was going to a Countrey, where Money beares no Masterie.’ This sort of self-denial – clearly Prest had need of money to sustain her while she awaited martyrdom – finds an echo in the stories of Alice Benden and Elizabeth Young as they also appear in the Mirrour. Young, it will be recalled, is one of the four women in the Acts and Monuments for whom Foxe provides long, complex examinations, in fact nine interviews taking up seven of his large-folio pages. In the Mirrour, however, she warrants one sentence: ‘Elizabeth Yong being committed to close prison, the keeper was charged by Doctor Martin in her hearing, to give her one day bread & an other day Water, to which shee made this answere, Sir, If you take away my meat, god I trust will take away my hunger.’ 18 Like Prest, Young is content to do without. The theme of women martyrs’ self-deprivation is most wordily developed in the tale of Alice Benden’s imprisonment, but Benden is also seen, in her extremity, concerning herself with the well-being of her father. Her story begins with the words, ‘shee beeing at the stake’, but this moment at the site of her execution, coming at the end of Foxe’s narrative in the context of her larger scene of death, serves, in Cotton’s, only as an entrée to the twin themes of family love and selfdenial: ‘shee beeing at the stake’, Benden takes out a shilling given to her by her father when she was first sent to prison. She asks her brother to return it to her father, ‘to do him to understand, that shee never lacked money while she lay in prison’.19 Benden’s touching concern for her father’s feelings is all the more laudable, since as the reader comes to learn, she often lacked money in prison, developing serious illhealth due to the paucity of food and drink. This is revealed in conjunction with another theme in her story, the clear affection felt for her by her brother, who was able to provide her with meat and drink during her initial imprisonment in Kent: after her removal to a less


accessible prison where he could no longer help her, she subsisted on minimal amounts of bread and water, coming close to starvation. However, Benden’s difficult imprisonment – something outside her control – is only part of the story, and Cotton closes the tale much as he does Prest’s and Young’s, his woman martyr demonstrating her strength of character through voluntary self-deprivation: before her removal to ‘Mondayes hole’, Benden and a fellow female prisoner spent two weeks living on two pence, half-penny a day, ‘to try thereby how wel they could sustaine penurie and hunger’.20 These stories all appear in the Acts and Monuments as minor episodes within larger narratives, but their careful selection and editing suggest an agenda on Cotton’s part in keeping with modern historiographical expectations for early modern ideas about female virtue, one much less evident in Foxe. Clearly family and food are things whose deprivation Cotton believes will resonate with his female audience, but at the same time his selections spotlight the female virtues of maternal love, family loyalty and moderation in food and drink. But Cotton does more than merely cut and paste apposite passages; more importantly, in the process of mining the Acts and Monuments for edifying tales, he reverses the subversive qualities of some of Foxe’s heroines. Both Grey and Askew lose their erudition, but again this is somewhat in keeping with Cotton’s general approach; more problematically, Prest’s wife and Elizabeth Young, both clearly shown in the Acts and Monuments subverting gendered expectations, in the Mirrour become exemplary of virtuous female domesticity: Young, the arrogant mocker of powerful men, becomes a model of patient self-deprivation and nothing else; Prest becomes exemplary of this and, ironically, of family attachment and loyalty. Nothing else remains of these women: erudition, wit, vituperation, impatience with ignorant authority and, in Prest’s case, the rejection of domesticity – these are all gone, and they are not just missing, but replaced. Prest and Young, no longer subversive, now serve as models of virtuous female behaviour. Cotton’s Mirrour is self-consciously both didactic and light, and with the exception of Alice Benden, it offers the fewest details about the women martyrs of all the early modern abridgements of the Acts and Monuments. The story of Alice Benden’s hunger and suffering in Bonner’s underground prison makes it into all abridgements following Cotton’s, apart from Mason’s, but her multifaceted story does continue to undergo instructive editing, offering a window into some of the concerns Foxe’s stories could elicit. Two aspects of her story, for example, had troubled the Catholic polemicist Robert Parsons, earning

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her condemnation in the Three Conversions (1604): her husband’s participation in her arrest, and, even more scandalously, her gift of her handkerchief to John Banks, a witness to her execution, which: ‘yt had by more decent for a wife, to have sent & given to her owne husband … But this was the spirit of ghospellinge systers in those dayes’.21 Only two Foxe abridgements, Cotton’s and Bright’s (the latter the only one published before the Three Conversions), mentions the culpability of Benden’s husband, and Ellis Hookes goes so far in his rehabilitation of him (or rather of his esteem for his wife) as not just to eliminate his eventual willingness to procure of her arrest, but at the same time to include his earlier attempts (also in Foxe) to secure her release. Benden’s husband in his version is concerned for his wife’s well-being, he never betrays her, and even his suggestion that Bishop Bonner keep his wife’s brother from her (resulting in her near-starvation in ‘Mondayes Hole’) seems, if not noble in itself, the act more of a desperate husband than of a bitter informer.22 None of the abridgements mentions Benden’s gift of her handkerchief to Banks, to Parsons an intimate gesture going a long way to explaining her husband’s willingness to be rid of her.23 While Benden’s story is consistently edited, perhaps in response (after Bright) to Parsons’ criticisms, the danger inherent in over-generalizing about gendered strategies in abridgement is evident in the literary fate of Prest’s wife, so patently domesticated in Cotton’s Mirrour. The nature of abridgement is to collapse Foxe’s narratives into exemplary passages, and while in Cotton’s case this meant eliminating explicit reference to Prest’s separation from her husband and children, most abridgements do not do this, instead emphasizing the passages describing her family’s idolatry and persecution of her as justification for her abandonment of them, along with her lack of learning and her refusal, as in Cotton, to accept financial assistance. Bright begins her story by stating that she was persecuted by her husband and children, but despite reporting her refusal to leave prison and return to them (‘I have but one husband which is here already in this citie … and in prison with me, from whom I will never depart’), he alone (apart from Cotton) fails to inform his reader that prior to her imprisonment Prest had already left her family. Bright eliminates from his narrative all evidence of Prest’s doctrinal erudition, spotlighting instead her own acknowledgement of her gendered simplicity and her constancy despite this: to the argument ‘Woman, thou art not able to answere to such high matters’, his Prest responds ‘I am not … yet with my death I am content to be a witnesse to Christes death’.24 She goes on, refusing a


pardon, to contrast, as in Foxe, her heavenly husband to her earthly one, the company of angels to her mortal children, reasserting her allegiance to God as father, mother, sister, brother and kinsman. Bright’s abridgement of the Prest story either informs or resembles most of those that follow. While unlike Bright making explicit Prest’s abandonment of her persecuting husband and children, later abridgers all highlight, as justification for her actions, the idolatry of her family and the fact that she fled ‘not for whoredome nor for theft’, but because of her family’s attempt to force her into idolatry.25 Mall’s Cloude of Witnesses, the Alphabetical Martyrology, and in particular Clarke’s abridgement also emphasize her lack of learning, and Mall and Clarke close their accounts, like Cotton, with her refusal to accept financial help while in prison: ‘God hath promised to feed me.’ The emphasis on both the idolatry of her family and Prest’s own self-effacement has the effect of giving the woman martyr a modesty mitigated in the Acts and Monuments by her vehement confession and her scriptural learning (despite the fact that she is a ‘simple’ woman); however, every abridgement but Cotton’s and the Alphabetical Martyrology also carry an anecdote again pointing to the danger of over-generalizing about the development of women’s martyr’s stories. In this anecdote, Prest says to a Dutchman repairing the noses of images damaged during Edward’s reign, ‘What a mad man are thou … to make them new noses, which within a few dayes shall all lose their heads’, going on to respond to his accusation of whoredom, ‘thy Images are Whores, and thou art a Whore-hunter; for doth not God say, “You go a whoring after strange gods, figures of your own making”?’ 26 Timid before the bishop examining her (and, notably, nothing remains in any abridgement of her encounters with Chancellor Blackstone), the abridged Prest is given a chance, nevertheless, to demonstrate her strength of language and cite scripture, if in an encounter with a foreign craftsman, certainly a less controversial target than the Bishop of Exeter or his lecherous chancellor. Nevertheless, and with this caveat, there is a tendency in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments to a conservatism not found in Foxe, particularly when it comes to his more surprising women’s stories. This is certainly so in the case of Alice Dryver, the most erudite of Foxe’s Marian women martyrs and one who earned, as will be recalled, strident condemnation in Parsons’ Three Conversions. In his attack on her, Parsons spotlights Dryver’s provocative arrest in a haystack with Alexander Gouch, questioning, as well, both Foxe’s failure to mention her husband and the veracity of his report of her long, complicated

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and morally victorious disputations with her learned examiners. While none of Foxe’s abridgers fail to mention Dryver’s two examinations, they do not convey their exceptional quality and, importantly, they tend to eliminate Gouch from Dryver’s story altogether, or at least his arrest in the haystack with her.27 Bright, for example, while putting Gouch and Dryver together in arrest and execution, omits the details of their arrest and identifies Dryver’s husband. First mentioning her likening of Queen Mary to Jezebel (and her subsequent punishment), he substitutes for Dryver’s lengthy examinations a few summary lines which are dominated by an exchange occurring towards the end of her second examination in the Acts and Monuments, a moment at which Dryver herself brings attention to the irony of her ability, as a ‘simple woman’, to put such learned men as her examiners to silence, in effect drawing on the strength-in-weakness paradigm:28 Drivers wife was twise examined, and with great boldnesse and constancie, maintained the trueth, and by power of the word did put to silence both the Chancelor, and Doctor Gascoyne … Which when she perceived, have you no more to say (quoth she.) God be honoured, you bee not able to resiste the Spirite of God in me a poore woman. I was an honest poore mans daughter, never brought up in the Universitie as you have beene, but I have driven the plough before my father (I thank God:) yet notwithstanding, in the defence of Gods truth, I wil set my foote against the foote of any of you all.29 Bright’s use of this passage – reminiscent of his centralization of Prest’s self-effacement – to represent what are, in Foxe, Dryver’s long, complex arguments, not to mention arrogance and vituperation, creates an image of a woman quite at odds with the one conveyed by Foxe in the Acts and Monuments, but one echoed in subsequent abridgements. Clarke, for example, while admitting to her discovery in a haystack with Gouch, all but eliminates Dryver’s dominance in his account, making it seem as if the two were examined together. Under examination, Dryver makes the statement quoted above (as in Bright), and again as in Bright, says little else: Clarke, like Bright, uses this passage to represent the whole.30 Similarly, while Dryver does not appear at all in Cotton’s Mirrour, she does make it into both the alphabetical martyrologies, neither of which mentions Gouch. Dryver’s insult to Mary remains intact, but again her examinations dissolve into the self-effacing passage used by Bright.31 Hookes gives a bit more space to Dryver’s examinations than his fellows, allowing her briefly to


debate the nature of the Sacrament, but like the alphabetical martyrologists, he omits all mention of either Gouch or the haystack. Apart from Cotton’s Mirrour, all early modern abridgements of Foxe memorialize Alice Dryver, if a less troubling version of her than the one appearing in the Acts and Monuments. If Hookes is prepared to go so far as to allow her some erudition, however, he seems in agreement with Parsons about the problems inherent to her relationship with Gouch. He, like his fellows, also seems to share Parsons’ concerns over Foxe’s privileging of the intelligence or constancy of some of the Marian wives over that of their husbands, and he adapts his abridgement accordingly. Where Foxe, for example, in his description of the martyrdoms of James and Margery Austoo, praises them both for soundness and strong confession, he adds that these qualities were particularly present in the woman, ‘to whom the Lord had given the greater knowledge and more fereventnesse of spirite’. This, it will be recalled, earned Parsons’ outrage: ‘Margery Austow her husbands Maister in ghospellinge’. 32 But in abridgement, when the couple appear at all, the Austoos become equals: there is no question in Bright, Mason, Clarke or Hookes of the wife’s intellectual or confessional superiority, and the martyred couple are entirely absent from Cotton, Mall and the Alphabetical Martyrology. The transformation of the Austoos in abridgement is echoed in a similar change imposed on a less edifying Foxe story, the martyrdom of Joan Dangerfield, who died in prison with her baby, and the suicide of her husband, William. When Foxe introduces the Dangerfields’ story it is with a clear emphasis on the wife and her infant, whose hardship exemplifies the cruelty of the Marian persecution: When I had written and finished the story of the Garnesey wemen, with the yong infant there with them burned, and also had passed the burnyng of the poore blind woman … I well hoped I should have found no mo such like stories of unmercifull crueltie shewed up, on sely women with their children and young infants: but now … I find an other story of such unmercifulnes shewed agaynst a woman in childbed, as farre from all charitie and humanitie, as hath bene any other story yet hetherto rehearsed, as by the sequele hereof may appeare.33 Joan and William Dangerfield are both imprisoned for heresy, but the husband succumbs to lies and persuasion and signs a recantation, earning both his wife’s lamentation over his lapse and his release from

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prison. Tormented by guilt, he attempts suicide: ‘and so departed he home toward his house: where by the way homeward (as it is affirmed) he tooke his death, and shortly after departed accordyng to his prayer, after he had endured in prison xv weekes’. Joan sticks to her confession and dies in prison, shortly followed by her infant. While Bright includes the Dangerfields’ story intact in his Abridgement, the couple’s story either changes in or disappears from all seventeenth-century abridgements (all of which follow publication of Parsons’s Three Conversions). The Dangerfields do not appear in Cotton or the Alphabetical Martyrology, and although the martyrologies of the later century (Mall, Clarke and Hookes) tell the story, they do so with subtle but important alterations. William Dangerfield, as in Foxe and Bright, recants, to his wife’s horror, but this does not earn his release; it is easy to assume a retraction, and there is no question of William’s attempted suicide. In Mall’s abridgement, he dies of guilt – not suicide – over his ‘promise’, but his release is not mentioned; nor are his wife and child’s deaths. Clarke’s William ‘began exceedingly to bewail the promise that he had made … and made his Prayer to Almighty god, desiring him that he might not live so long … And shortly after he died, having lien in Prison Twelve weeks’ (his wife and child die soon thereafter).34 Hookes’ account, strangely introduced as ‘The Sufferings of William Dangerfield’, similarly reports that following William’s recantation and his wife’s lament, ‘the sence of the Action reflected so much upon his Conscience that it brake the man’s heart, so that in a short time after he died, after he had endured twelve Weeks Imprisonment’.35 Again, Joan’s death, and the infant’s, soon followed. While none of these accounts explicitly claims that Dangerfield, like his wife, died in prison, the reader is given to suppose that he did. This is particularly the case in Clarke and Hookes, who time his death according to his imprisonment, like Foxe, but, again, without mentioning his release. Dangerfield is not fully rehabilitated – he is still guilty of recantation – but his abandonment of his wife and child to their fate in prison, like his suicide attempt, disappears. Foxe’s abridgers often seem less comfortable than he with stories centralizing the superiority of wives over their husbands. Such subtle deprivileging of female dominance in these accounts is of a piece with the displacement of female erudition found in the abridgements of Askew, Prest and Dryver, three of Foxe’s four women martyrs who engage in long, erudite debate. His fourth such woman is Elizabeth Young, the book smuggler repeatedly accused during her nine examinations as they appear in Foxe of whoredom, and even transvestitism,


and who, while not executed, declares in the Acts and Monuments her willingness to die for her faith: ‘Here is my carkas: doe with it what ye will.’36 Neither Bright nor Clarke mentions Elizabeth Young, perhaps because she was not burned as a martyr. Her presence in Cotton’s Mirrour for that reason is rather surprising, and her escape from martyrdom remains unmentioned, but as discussed above, her entry is brief and distorts the image of the learned and vitriolic woman so vividly portrayed in the Acts and Monuments. Again, Cotton celebrates Young only for her willingness to go without food and drink – her belief that God will provide for her. While Cotton’s tribute to Young is hardly representative of Foxe’s, the patience and self-denial celebrated by him dominate later accounts. The anonymous compiler of the Alphabetical Martyrology, for example, tells his reader a bit more about Young than Cotton does, specifying the cause of her arrest (bookselling) and the reason for her escape from martyrdom (Queen Mary’s illness). But while stating that she was examined many times, he offers nothing of her interrogations, merely echoing Cotton by quoting her response to Dr Martin’s threat to withhold food from her: ‘she said cheerfully, If ye take away my meat, I trust God will take away my hunger.’ 37 Mall repeats this tribute, using it to close his brief account in which, without reference to her occupation, the extent of her examinations or the fact that she escaped martyrdom, he presents a few lines from her first and second examinations, which, according to the now familiar style, give no hint as to the extent of her learning. In his account, Young’s examinations reveal her determination to keep her conscience clean and her willingness to suffer: when faced with the threat of torture, she responds with extreme if godly passivity – ‘Here is my carkase, do with it what you will, and more than that you cannot have … Do what God shall suffer you to do’ – following this up with the self-denying declaration of helplessness, closing her account, ‘If you take away my meat, I trust that God will take away my hunger.’38 While the longest of the abridged accounts of Young’s ordeal, Hookes’ is perhaps the most confused. He collapses her nine examinations into one paragraph entitled ‘The Examination of Elizabeth Young before M. Hussey’, in the Acts and Monuments her first examiner. This paragraph moves quickly from Hussey’s first questions to Young about her parentage, to Dr Martin’s later threats of torture, and finally to Sir Roger Cholmley’s declaration that she must be a man in woman’s clothing, even including his reaction to her emphasis (in Foxe) when it comes to the sacrament of the altar: ‘Spirit and Faith, Whore?’ What this account does not do, however, is attribute to Young the scriptural

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learning that in Foxe provokes such expostulation. For this is the point in the Acts and Monuments: in Foxe, Sir Roger and Dr Martin are driven to their sexualized insults against Young by her erudition, while here they are merely gratuitously threatening and vulgar. While Hookes’ examiners embarrass themselves, as they do in Foxe, Hookes’ Young does not exhibit her learning, as she does in Foxe. Most of the confession in Hookes’ paragraph is actually her examiners’, not Young’s. She is a largely silent, certainly passive, witness to and victim of their extremity, and while she declares, again, her dependency on Christ, her belief, again, that Christ will take away her hunger, and her willingness, again, to suffer torture and even burning, she never expresses the terms of her faith, the reason for her persecution, her rejection of the real presence. She never herself speaks the words repeated by Cholmley: ‘Spirit and Faith, Whore?’ Hookes’ Elizabeth Young is exemplary, but not of Foxe’s Elizabeth Young. Far from dominating the men who interview her, she allows them to dominate her, declaring all the while her willingness to suffer anything at their hands. She does this in Foxe too, but in Foxe she also gives her interrogators a run for their intellectual money – and in the process a reason for their persecution of her. This is what is missing in later accounts, as it is missing from the examinations of Askew, Dryver and Prest. Only one of Foxe’s abridgers gives any real space to Foxe’s women martyrs’ erudition or even basic confession: Thomas Mason, whose Christs Victorie was published in 1615. Mason’s is the third (after Bright and Cotton) of the early Foxe abridgements, the three standing in stark contrast to one another. While Cotton’s small, accessible volume clearly targets a popular audience, Bright and Mason both produced relatively big books – if nothing to the Acts and Monuments itself – historiographical and learned. The difference in their approach, however, can be observed in their different treatment of the Askew examinations. While Bright, again, offers only a narrative summary in which he focuses on Askew’s reticence, Mason, by contrast, reproduces a number of excerpts from the first-person account in which she explicitly and learnedly explicates her system of belief. Introducing Askew without any reference to her personal past, Mason only briefly refers to the First Examination, assuring his reader that ‘though she had affirmed the truth of the Sacrament, yet none could touch her for her arguments by the law’. 39 Omitting all reference to her recantation, he continues to spotlight her confession: ‘she wrote’, he reports, ‘her minde of the Sacament [sic] as followeth’, reproducing, in parts, the didactic epistle opening the Lattre Examination, Askew’s confession


from Newgate Prison, her description of her condemnation, her belief as she wrote it to the Privy Council, her account of her torture and Foxe’s of her execution. Mason’s Askew is a learned and stalwart witness, more constant and certainly more articulate than Bright’s. Both her torture and her initial reticence lose pride of place in his account to her confession, which she is seen to express herself. Mason and Bright offer very different portraits of Askew, but their abridgements have different purposes. While Bright’s, as Nussbaum has argued, was intended to serve the cause of a visible, national, English church, Mason’s, on the other hand, follows an explicitly apocalyptic agenda. Introducing himself in his abridgement’s dedicatory epistle (addressed to Edward Coke, James I’s Lord Chief Justice) as ‘a professed soldier under Christs Banner, in the behalfe of his spouse against Antichrist’, Mason takes as his theme the historical and prophetic struggle between Christ and Antichrist, opening the body of his work with an exegesis of the Book of Revelation. His purpose is more like Foxe’s than Bright’s (and he criticizes earlier abridgement for superficiality in his dedication), and in that context the confession of individual martyrs – inheritors of the persecuted, apostolic church – dominates: he intends to present ‘all the points of Religion that the Martyrs defended’. 40 Askew, like any other martyr, male or female, is relevant primarily for her confession in the face of persecution, as a member of Christ’s true, invisible, persecuted church. Mason’s Prest, if much more briefly and with less erudition than Askew, also debates the nature of the Sacrament of the Altar with her examiners, and he shows little concern with moulding her story to emphasize the reasons for her separation from her family.41 Mason is also less reserved than his fellows in his treatment of Alice Dryver: he admits to the haystack episode, and while he makes short work of her examinations, his Dryver, like his Prest, debates the nature of the Sacrament. Mason too has his limits. Prest and Dryver, while able to express the ‘points of Religion’ for which they died, do so only briefly. Margery and James Austoo in his account become equals in strength and intelligence, as they do in other abridgements, and the Dangerfields disappear entirely, as does Elizabeth Young. However, of all the abridgements of the Acts and Monuments produced during the century following Foxe’s death, Mason’s comes closest to representing the erudition given, or allowed, to Foxe’s women martyrs. In this, it is the exception proving the rule: the tendency in abridging Foxe’s disorderly heroines was to domesticate and silence, instilling passivity where there was once arrogance, simple faith where there was once scriptural

Conclusion 179

erudition, and silence where there was once self-expression. If Foxe’s Catholic critics found his women martyrs troubling, so, apparently, did a number of his admirers, and in their ultimate expressions of admiration – their abridgements of his great work – they worked hard at correcting it. The most popular abridgement of Foxe was also the most successful at this. Clement Cotton, whose Mirrour of Martyrs saw eight seventeenth-century editions, successfully transformed Foxe’s female models for righteous disobedience, into models, instead, for virtuous female behaviour.

Notes Chapter 1 1 For a succinct description of the legislation, see Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 16–23. 2 Mary Tudor was born to Henry and Catherine in 1512. Anne Boleyn, pregnant at the time of her marriage to Henry, bore him a second daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533. 3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 23. 4 The rate at which England changed from a ‘Catholic’ to a ‘Protestant’ nation is a matter of some debate, hinging largely on the question of the Reformation’s origins: was reform ‘from above’ a response to reform ‘from below’, or did it force reform on an unwilling or indifferent populace? The chief exponent of rapid reform from below remains A. G. Dickens, who has recently defended the arguments he made 40 years ago in The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964) in his chapter, ‘The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England: 1520–1558’, included in a collection edited by Margo Todd, Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Revisionists stressing popular continuity faced with unpopular reforms from above are led by J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy. See Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 5 There were approximately 800 exiles. See C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 41–2. 6 Some of Foxe’s biographers, including his son Simeon, have found this a quite surprising honour, given Foxe’s social status and the fact that he was not a graduate of Magdalen. However, fellows of Magdalen were normally natives of Lincolnshire, the county of Foxe’s birth. This preference was a legacy of the college’s founder, William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, who was born in Lincolnshire. A new college founded in 1448, Magdalen (like Brasenose) was also, from an early date, able to board independent students – i.e. commoners. See A. L. Rowse, Oxford in the History of the Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 52. 7 Warren Wooden suggests that had there been doubts about Foxe’s orthodoxy in 1539, he would not have been awarded his fellowship, so it is likely that his conversion accompanied his religious study at Magdalen (Warren W. Wooden, John Foxe [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983], 2). This interpretation is complicated, however, by the fact that Foxe’s chambre-fellow and 180

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10

11

12 13

14

15

assigned companion (which as a commoner he warranted) at Brasenose was Alexander Nowell, future Dean of St Paul’s. Nowell, a noted Protestant, left the college in the year of Foxe’s transfer to Magdalen, by which time the two had formed what would be a life-long friendship. He was several years older than his young charge, and one must assume that he exerted some influence over the younger man. J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1940), 25; Wooden, John Foxe, 3. Simeon Foxe, ‘The Life of Mr John Fox’ (attributed to Samuel Foxe), in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: Company of Stationers, 1641), II, A5v. The Latin manuscript is Lansdowne 388, 2r–51v. There is some debate as to which of Foxe’s sons wrote the memoir. Mozley, however, argues convincingly that the author was the younger son, Simeon (Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 2–9). When the memoir was published Samuel had been dead for eleven years and a note from a relative of the Foxes attached to the memoir identifies its author as D. doctorem Foxum, an appropriate title for Simeon, but not for Samuel, etc. (BL MS Lansdowne 388, 2r). During this period Foxe produced a number of pieces, all published in London by Hugh Singleton. The first three are translations of continental works: A Frutfull sermon of the moost Evangelicall wryter M. Luther, made of the Angelles upon the xviii. Chapt. of Mathew (1547); A Sarmon, of Ihon Oecolampadius, to yong men, and maydens (1548); and Urbanus Regius, An Instruccyon of Christen Fayth howe to be bolde up on the promise of God and not to doubte of Our Salvacyon (1548). His original publications from this period are De non plectendis morte adulteris consultatio (1548); De lapsis in ecclesiam recipiendis (1549); De Censura sive Excommunicatione Ecclesiastica (1551); and a Tables of Grammar which does not survive (1552). Gardiner was a protégé of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and presided over the court that nullified Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He argued for the royal supremacy of the church in De Vera Obedientia (1535), but remained an active enemy of the evangelical movement throughout Henry’s reign and beyond. He was imprisoned during Edward VI’s reign, but was reinstated by Mary and appointed her Lord High Chancellor, which office he held until his death in 1555, having reversed his opinion on the royal supremacy. Simeon Foxe, ‘Life of Mr John Fox’, A7r; Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 38–9. Strasbourg hosted one of the five original English exile congregations during Mary’s reign, the other four being in Emden, Wesel, Frankfort and Zurich. Basle, Geneva and Aarau developed substantial communities as the number of exiles increased, and the original five either fragmented (like Frankfort) or collapsed (like Wesel). Full title: Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum maximarumque per totam Europam persecutionum a Wiclevi temporibus ad hanc usque aetatem descriptio (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihelius, 1554). Full title: Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum, quae postremis et periculosis his temporibus evenerunt, maximarumque per Europam persecutionum, et sanctorum Dei martyrum, caeterarumque rerum si uae insignioris exempli sint, digesti perregna et nationes commentarii. Pars Prima, in qua primum de rebus per Angliam et

182 Notes

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18

19

20

21

Scotiam gestis, atque in primis de horrenda sub Maria nuper regina persecutione narratio continetur (Basle: Joannes Oporinus, 1559). William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 14. David Loades, ‘The Early Reception’. In John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Online Variorum Edition: Introductory Essays (www. hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/apparatus/introessays.html), 3 (print version). David M. Loades, The Oxford Martyrs (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd, 1970), 30. While parish churches were not required to buy the Acts and Monuments, many did. A number of such purchases are listed in Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 65. See C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558 (St Albans: Paladin, 1977), 302; Steven Mullaney, ‘Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 238. Paul Christianson argues that the Acts and Monuments was one of the two most popular books in Elizabethan and Stuart England, the other being the Geneva Bible (Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978], 36, 39). See also Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996, first pub. 1993), 33. Richard Helgerson ranks the Acts and Monuments in importance in ‘shaping England’s religious selfunderstanding’ with the English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 253). Jesse Lander, ‘Foxe’s Books of Martyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69. John Knott calls the Acts and Monuments ‘an inescapable text’ of its period. A. G. Dickens notes the presence of Foxe’s book ‘even in those [homes] where other books seldom intruded’, and Christopher Hill marks the end of Laudian censorship (according to which Foxe was banned) with the immediate recirculation of the Acts and Monuments (John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 2; A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation [New York: Schocken Books, 1964], 305; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down [London and New York: Penguin, 1971], 96). From its first publication in English in 1563, the work saw nine folio editions by 1684, including six by the end of Elizabeth’s reign, by which time it had ‘achieved the status of magisterial and unimpeachable orthodoxy’ (Lander, 72). The Acts and Monuments’ profound influence was noted even by one of Foxe’s most vehement early detractors, the Jesuit polemicist Robert Parsons (Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 177). Mark Breitenberg, ‘The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 25, 4 (1989): 388; Mullaney, 238–9.

Notes 183 22 Breitenberg, ‘The Flesh Made Word’, 391. 23 Mullaney, ‘Reforming Resistance’, 239. 24 Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: the English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17. Collinson cites J. R. Green’s A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), 447. Stephen Greenblatt argues of Protestant identity that ‘it was achieved at the intersection of an absolute authority and a demonic other, but the authority has shifted from the visible church to the book’ (Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 76). 25 Charleton, Women, Religion and Education, 66. Lady Mary Grey (d. 1578) was the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, and sister to Lady Jane Grey. Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) was a dedicated diarist, and some of her journals have been published as The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: the Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, ed. Joanna Moody (London: Sutton, 1998). Lady Mary Rich (d. 1678) was the Countess of Warwick. Katherine Brettergh (d. 1601) was the wife of William Bettergh, High Constable of West Derby Hundred, an active persecutor of Catholic recusants. Her ‘godly’ death was memorialized in William Harrison’s Deaths Advantage (1602). Brilliana Harley was the wife of Sir Robert Harley, the firt Earl of Oxford (1661–1724). 26 For Foxe’s editing of letters between male martyrs and their female ‘sustainers’, see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: the Elizabethan Martyrologist and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 8–33. 27 See Ellen Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs’, Sixteenth Century Journal 19, 1 (1988): 65. 28 Eric Josef Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 58. 29 See Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75; and idem, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 30 See Crawford, Women and Religion in Britain, 13–15. 31 For example, Crawford, Women and Religion in Britain, 40, 47; Natalie Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, first pub. 1975); Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, Sixteenth Century Journal 13, 2 (1982): 17–42; idem, ‘The Reformation of Women’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, third edn, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard and Merry E. Wiesner (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), 184–7; Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Merry E. Wiesner, ‘The Reformation of the Women’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Sonderband: Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationem und Debatten, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel in collaboration with Hans Füglister (Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 208. 32 Merry Wiesner, ‘Luther and Women: the Death of Two Marys’, in Feminist Theology: a Reader, ed. Ann Loades (London: Society for the Promotion of

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33 34 35 36 37

38

39

40

41

42

Christian Knowledge, 1990), 125. Wiesner argues that Luther established the New Testament figure of Martha, the good housewife, as the female ideal, at the same time denigrating her sister Mary, who devoted herself to Christ through learning his teachings, and Mary the mother of Christ, blessed for her virginity. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 40. Roper, Oedipus, 43. Roper, Oedipus, 46. Roper, Holy Household, 2, 130–1. On the importance of the word ‘whore’ in classifying disorderly womanhood in post-Reformation England, see also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163; idem, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 24. See, for example, chapters by Malcolm Gaskill, Laura Gowing, Martin Ingram and James Sharpe in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994). Also, Gowing, Domestic Dangers; and idem, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). See also James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft and in England, 1550–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and idem, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History 10, 1 (April 1998): 1–25. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988), 67. As posited by Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); idem, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea’; Roper, Oedipus, 3–52; and David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See, for example, Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England; Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989) and idem, ‘The Significance of the Early-Modern Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 8–25. On post-Reformation English

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44 45

46

47

Calvinism and the role of popery within it, see, for example, Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery’; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987). On clerical celibacy as a mark of Antichrist, see Helen L. Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent, Policy and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 119–23. See Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, first pub. 1975), 131. Charles C. Butterworth, ‘Erasmus and Bilney and Foxe’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 57 (1953): 575–9; John Fines, ‘A Note on the Reliability of Foxe’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 14, 2 (October 1962): 173–4; A. G. Dickens, ‘Heresy and the Origins of English Protestantism’, in Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 2, ed. John S. Bromley and Ernest H. Kossman (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1964); J. A. F. Thompson, ‘John Foxe and Some Sources for Lollard History: Notes for a Critical Appraisal’, in Studies in Church History, vol. 2, ed. G. J. Cuming (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965). Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in his Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994). Thomas S. Freeman has published a series of articles considering Foxe’s method, including the following: ‘Notes on a Source for John Foxe’s Account of the Marian Persecution in Kent and Sussex’, Historical Research 67 (1994): 203–11; ‘Research, Rumour and Propaganda: Anne Boleyn in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, The Historical Journal 38, 4 (1995): 797–819; ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”’; cf. fn 27; ‘“As a true subject being prisoner”: John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554–5’, English Historical Review, 117, 470 (2002): 104–16; and with Sarah Elizabeth Wall, ‘Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: the Account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, 4.1 (Winter 2001): 1165–96. See also ‘“St Peter did not do thus”: Papal History in the Acts and Monuments’, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Online Variorum Edition: Introductory Essays (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/apparatus/introessays.html). On Foxe’s invention of the Catherine Parr story, see John King, ‘Fiction and Fact in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (London: Scholar Press, 1997), 31–2. John Guy suggests that if Foxe’s story of Parr’s danger and ultimate submission to Henry is true, then the latter – her submission – was probably staged (John Guy, Tudor England [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 196). I would like to thank Tom Freeman for sharing with me the fruits of his own investigation of Foxe’s account, and his conclusion that the best argument against the authenticity of the story is the absence of any contemporary mention of it. Interestingly, as Freeman has also pointed out to me, Foxe lived with John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, from autumn 1560 to summer 1562, the two years preceding publication of the first edition of the Acts and Monuments, in which the story does not appear: as Parkhurst was Parr’s chaplain when she was queen, Freeman speculates that had the incident occurred, Foxe surely would have learned of it from him in time to include it in the 1563 edition.

186 Notes The story, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to another one also appearing for the first time in the second edition of the Acts and Monuments, describing the similar humiliation of the same villains at the conclusion of the Prebendaries Plot against Thomas Cranmer. Interpreting Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman (written for Catharine of Aragon), Susan Wabuda has noted his emphasis on women’s use of obedience as a means by which she could ‘turn[ed] convention on its head, by revealing herself to be the strong and capable partner in the union’. See Susan Wabuda, ‘Sanctified by the Believing Spouse: Women, Men and the Marital Yoke in the Early Reformation’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119. See Carole Levin, ‘Women in the Book of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England’, International Journal of Women’s Studies 4, 2 (1981): 199. See Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1165–96. Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Maur, PA: 1942), 4–5. See Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1964): 149–70. See Freeman, ‘“St Peter did not do thus,”’ I, 4 (print version).

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Chapter 2 1

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V. Norskov Olsen identifies the Ecclesiasticae Historiae of Matthias Flacius Illyricus (better known as the Magdeburg Centuries) as the ‘first Protestant church history’ (John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], 20). The Magdeburg Centuries, however, were published between 1561 and 1574, a full 20 years after the Image. See Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, 9–15; Richard Kenneth Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 205–8; Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 41–4. While William Tyndale had designated Antichrist as the eternal representative of evil on earth, Bale ‘institutionalized’ him as embodied in the false church. The early century saw a growing debate about the canonicity of the text, one mainly based on the question of its authorship (whether John the Divine was the same man as John the Evangelist), but also on its past appeal to medieval heretical sects. Erasmus of Rotterdam challenged the canonicity of the Apocalypse, arguing against its apostolic authorship and suggesting that it was tinged with heresy: while the text might be ‘holy’, it was ‘less holy’ than canonical, apostolic Scripture (Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenburg [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 3–5). Luther’s 1522 attack on Revelation was different – while he had clearly read Erasmus’s Annotations (1516) criticizing the text, his reasons for rejecting it are theological rather than philological: to Luther, Revelation neither teaches nor recognizes Christ, and its author, who is not the Evangelist, is too

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14 15 16 17 18

self-promoting. Luther never accepted the text’s canonicity, although he did accept it as holy. Full title Commentarius in Apocalypsin ante Centum Annos aeditus (Wittenberg, 1528). Backus, Reformation Readings, 7. As Irena Backus points out, Joachim himself was influenced in his sevenages periodization by the eighth-century English monk, Bede, who divided the Apocalypse into seven summares (or periochae), which later became seven visions (Backus, Reformation Readings, xiv–xv). Bale cites Lambert more than any other author, 42 times, but he deviates from him significantly, in both his interpretation of Revelation and his ‘close integration of history and exegesis’. See Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978), 23–5. Lambert, while using Joachim as an interpreter of signs and symbols, does not historicize Revelation himself, instead arguing, unlike Luther, that it should be interpreted for what it tells of the glory of God, not as a history of the church (Backus, Reformation Readings, 12–13). Bale acknowledges his debt to Joachim in the Image, citing him twelve times (Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 24). As Marjorie Reeves has pointed out, as of 1553 Bale owned a number of Joachimist manuscripts and printed texts, but Bauckham cautions that it can be ascertained neither how many of these were collected following his Henrician exile, nor, indeed, how much of his library he had with him in Germany during the Image’s authorship (Marjorie Reeves, The Prophetic Sense of History in Medieval and Renaissance Europe [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999], 104–6). Reeves uses Honor McCusker’s list of titles in Bale’s book collection, as of 1553 (McCusker, John Bale, 29 passim). Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 17–18. Backus, Reformation Readings, xiii. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 56–7. Quoted in Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 57. Backus, Reformation Readings, xviii. See also Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 20–1. Bernard McGinn sees Joachim’s pastor angelicus as usurping the role of the ‘Last World Emperor’, a mythical figure (deriving from a seventhcentury Syriac text attributed to Pseudo-Methodius) who gives his crown to Jesus, ending the Roman Empire and triggering the advent of Antichrist. See Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 66–7. Bale had works on the Apocalypse and Genesis by John of Olivi in his library as of 1553, as well as other Joachimist and pseudo-Joachimist works (Reeves, 104–5). Bauckham, however, thinks it unlikely that at the time he wrote the Image, Bale had seen Olivi’s commentary (Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 25). Backus, Reformation Readings, xviii. McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 63–4. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 18. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 13. Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 28–9; Backus, Reformation Readings, 12.

188 Notes 19

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21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28

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30

For the popularity of Adso’s Libellus de Antichristo, see Bauckham (Tudor Apocalypse, 19) and Curtis V. Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Leiden: Koninkilijke Brill NV, 1998), 26–7. An English version of the Adsonian Antichrist legend was printed in English in 1520 (Here begynneth the byrthe and lyfe of the moost false and deceytfull Antechryst), and an English translation of the Libellus itself was circulating among English Catholics during the mid-sixteenth century (Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 91–2). The Whole workes of W. Tyndall, John Frith , and Doct. Barnes, three worthy Martyrs and principall teachers of this Churche of England, collected and compiled in one Tome together, being before scattered, & now in Print here exhibited to the Church. To the prayse of God and profite of all good Christian readers (London: John Daye, 1573), 60–1. Firth, Apocalyptic Tradition, 25–6. Frith wrote an introduction to an English translation of Luther’s Offenbarung des Endchrist (1529), published in 1529 as An Antithesis between Christ and the Pope. Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, 9. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), 220–1. Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church, 71. Paul Carus, The Bride of Christ (Chicago: Open Court, 1908), 5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 98–100, passim. The association of the Whore of Babylon with a cup is not new: she is described holding one in Revelation 17, and she holds one in medieval iconography. But her cup, in such earlier imagery, exists alongside Ecclesia’s chalice. The medieval Ecclesia is sometimes opposed, not to the Whore of Babylon, but to synagoga. As Jo Spreadbury notes, the positive image of woman represented by Ecclesia is often balanced by a negative image. See Jo Spreadbury, ‘The Gender of the Church: The Female Image of Ecclesia in the Middle Ages’, in Gender and Christian Religion: Papers Read at the 1996 Summer Meeting and the 1997 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson (London: The Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1998), 97–8. As Helen Parish has shown, this argument against the institution of clerical celibacy was common in English polemic from the 1520s, and was conducted at two levels. First, the imposition of clerical celibacy by the papacy could be related to biblical prophecies both about the ‘man of sin’ (as in II Thessalonians 2), and about those who would follow devilish doctrines (as in I Timothy 4); and second, the extent to which the institution had been enforced within the church could indicate Antichrist’s influence within it (Parish, Clerical Marriage, 119–23). As Freeman has argued, Bale often went much further in this respect than Foxe was prepared to follow him. When using Bale’s Catalogus as a source for his papal history, Foxe frequently omitted some of his mentor’s wilder stories about papal whoring, sodomy and incest. Freeman argues that this was motivated by Foxe’s desire to maintain

Notes 189

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34 35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

credibility, as well as his method of associating individual popes with particular sins (Freeman, ‘“St Peter did not do thus”’, II, 11–12 [print version]). For a comprehensive discussion of the relevance of inversion and contrariety to ideas about gender difference, see Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: a Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For a discussion of the hardening of polar conceptions of gender during the High Middle Ages, see Susan Stuard, ‘The Domination of Gender: Women’s Fortunes in the High Middle Ages’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European Society, second edn, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present 87 (1980): 98–127; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The Witchhunt in Scotland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 9. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 5; Martin Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed, Barry Reay (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985); Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold’; Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992). Freeman, ‘“St Peter did not do thus”’, II, 8 (print version); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery’, 73–4. See Parish, Clerical Marriage, 116. The popularity of the Image is also attested to by the fact that it formed the basis of the notes on Revelation in the 1560 Geneva Bible. John Bale, The Image of both churches after the moste wonderful and heavenly Revelacion of Saincte John the Evangelyst, contaynyng a very frutefull exposytion or Paraphrase upon the same, Wherin it is conferrd with the other scripturs, and most authorised histories (London: John Wyer, 1550), I, Ai(v). Bale, Image, I, Bvi(v)–Bviii(v). Bale, Image, I, Ciiii(r–v). Bale, Image, I, Cv(r–v). William Tyndale, The newe Testament, dylygently corrected and compared with the Greke by Willyam Tindale (Antwerp: Marten Emperowre, 1534), Lxi(r). Tyndale, newe Testament, vii(r). Tyndale, newe Testament, cccciiii(r). Tyndale, newe Testament, ccxciv(v). Bale, Image, III, Aaii(v). Tyndale, newe Testament, ccclxxvii(r)–ccclxxviii(r). Bale, Image, III, Aavii(r). The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy scrypture, bothe of the olde and newe testament, truly translated after the veryte of the hebrue and Greke textes, by the dylygent studye of dyverse excellent learned men, expert in the forsayde tonges (London: Rychard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, 1539), iiii. Kynges. ix, lxv(v). Bale, Image, I, Cv(r).

190 Notes 49

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51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

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John Bale, The Actes of Englysh votaryes, comprehendynge their unchaste practices and examples by all ages, from the worldes begynnynge to thys present yeare, collected out of their owne legends and Chronycles (Wesel, 1546), 6v, 77r. John Frith (1503–33), burned for heresy during Henry VIII’s reign, was a Cambridge fellow who went into exile in 1528, joining Tyndale in Marburg (he unwisely returned to England in 1533). He was notorious for his Protestant polemic, and famously engaged in printed disputation with Thomas More over purgatory and the nature of the Sacrament. John Frith (as Richard Brightwell), A pistle to the Christen reader. The Revelation of Antichrist, and Antithesis / wherin are compared to geder Christes actes and oure holye father the popes (Antwerp, 1529), xxi(v). Frith, A pistle, xxii(r). Frith, A pistle, xxx(r). For example, note the emphasis: ‘theyr false interpretacions of scrytpure, theyr wycked tradicyons, thyr doctrine of devils, their lyes in hypocrysye, theyr erroures, theyr stynkyne Chastetye (whome God and his aungels abhorreth and the divel most highly aloweth) wyth al their other filthiness thei must laiye aside’ (Bale, Image, I, Gviii[v]). Frith, A pistle, lxxii(v). Bale, Image, II, kiiii(r). Bale, Image, II, kvi(v). Bale, Image, II, kvii(v). Bale, Image, III, Aaiii(r). Bale, Image, III, Aaiiii(r). Bale, Image, III, Aavii(r). Bale, Image, III, Aavii(r)–Aaviii(r). Bale, Image, III, Bbi(r), Bbiiii(v). Bale, Image, III, Bbviii(r). Bale, Image, III, Ccii(r). Bale, Image, III, Cciiii(r). Bale, Image, III, Eev(v). Bale, Image, II, ci(v). The identification of the Woman clothed with the Sun as the church was a commonplace in apocalyptic exegesis, adopted by Joachim, and later Lambert and Sebastian Meyer, although Lambert also allowed for the possibility that she represented the Virgin Mary (Backus, Reformation Readings, 46). Bale, Image, II, cii(v), ciii(r). Bale, Image, II, gii(v). ‘No woman childe is he, impotent, weake and feble, but a manchilde, bringing with hym always a strong, mighty, and invincible spirite, wher as he is unfainedly received. For he is the mighty Lorde that is valeaunt in batayle’ (Bale, Image, II, cv[r]). Other commentators who identify the woman of Revelation 12 as the church giving birth to Christ do not, however, explicitly identify her as God’s spouse. Alone of continental Protestant commentators, Antoine du Pinet makes this association, in his French apocalyptic work, Familère et briefve Exposition sur l’Apocalpyse de sainct Jehan l’apostre (1539). See Backus, Reformation Readings, 46, passim. Bale, Image, II, cv(r–v).

Notes 191 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81

82

83 84

85 86

87 88

89

Bale, Image, III, Eevii(r–v). In 1956, Ruth Kelso described the ideal woman as she found her in Renaissance literature, without specific reference to religion or country. Kelso found that Renaissance theorists, unable to ‘see’ the lady outside her marital role, focused in their writing on education and upbringing for women on preparation for one vocation, marriage. The woman who emerges from Kelso’s study has become, with various minor modifications, the model informing most modern study of early modern women: chaste, silent, discreet, loving, modest and obedient. See Ruth K. Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956). Bale, Image, III, Kkviii(v). Bale, Image, III, Hhiiii(v), Jjiii(r). Bale, Image, I, Avi(v). AM, I, Aiii(r). Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, 75. John Hazel Smith argues convincingly that Christus Triumphans was written during Foxe’s exile, almost certainly after the imprisonment of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley in the Bocardo prison in Oxford (Foxe refers to this prison in the text). For this and other reasons, Smith suggests early 1556 as the period of the play’s authorship (John Hazel Smith [ed.], Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist [Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1973], 31–3). For a discussion of the play’s aesthetic quality, dramatic genre and antecedents, see Smith (31–44). Foxe describes the play in his dedicatory epistle to English merchants in exile: ‘Potissimum autem in Ecclesiae persecutionibus describendis versatur comeodiae nostrae materia, quibus infoelix ille veterator, ex quo è coelo per Christum exturbatus est, nunquam destitit sponsam Christi fatigare.’ See John Foxe, Christus Triumphans, Comoedia Apocalyptica (Basilae: Joannem Oporinum, 1556), A6v–A7r. Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 6. ‘Nunc sine notis amicisque omnibus, inops / Ac orba, terraeque peripsema, deferor: / Unicus adhuc, in quod superest sponsus mihi / Christus, nostrae semper baculus familiae’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 29). Anabasius’s description of Constantine to Dioctes: ‘Is Christo nunc amicus, nobis inimicus’st acerrimus’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 44). ‘Quo magis haec levia, corpus quae feriunt, fero: / Quae etsi pungunt, punctus tamen id tempori, est, / Illa aeternum durant’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 47). ‘Sampsoni huic erademus per meretriculam / Caput’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 49). ‘Voluptatis nulla aberit esca. Quicquid in / Mundo celsum est, tentigine aut ulla lenocinans, / Incutiam, veneno ut qui aspergant saccarum’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 50). ‘Hunc denique referre undique addecet / Leges faxis, Martyrum scriptas sanguine: … / … Tum Ecclesia nec deerit / Tibi facticia, sponsam itidem is ut habet suam: / sed exquisitis quae ornetur vestibus / Prorsusque regio

192 Notes

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91 92

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94 95 96 97

98

99

100 101

102 103

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strepitu dissluat. / Dabis & hunc fornicationis cyathum, / Quo reges meretricio inebriet toxico, / Luxu imbues, ac deliciis omnia: / Quo siet, hos ut pessundes ad inertiam. / Virtutem enim voluptas viros dedocet’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 51–2). ‘rebus publicis privatisque omnium /… principes / Hoc pacto reddes facile ad genua supplices. / Tum confirmationem ex te ut petant vide’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 52). Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 54. Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 59. Henry VIII was named ‘Defender of the Faith’ in 1521 by Pope Leo X, thus Europus is identified with England. The French monarchs were called ‘Most Christian’. ‘Ecclesiam, inquiunt, / Omnipotentis Dei, Agni sponsam, veritatis columen. /… Mox tres fiunt Reges obviam: / Iis propino cyathum fornicarium huncce. Vinum Ubi Concaluit … / … Soli ubi sumus, occipiunt, forma quae / Mea, aetasque sua – amoris pariter quam impotens telum siet / … unius ut / Concedus notis copiam … / Suadent, orant, obsecrari, suspirant … coepi detrectare primulum, / Suevimus ut meretriculae, cupidos cum cupimus magis esse, qui / Nos ambiunt … / Pignus coepi, cras ut redirent iussi. Siquidem diem tibi, ut / Dixi, hunc Pseudamne datura sum’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 60–1). ‘Stat firma Dei electio, habens signaculum hoc: scit ille, qui / Sunt eius’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 64). A popular orator: perhaps a preacher. This clearly denotes the imprisonment of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley. ‘Antichristum esse te / Denique, constanter credier … esseque / Pornapolim hanc, pellicem Babyloniam, die / Magis lucescere’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 73). ‘Sed nil / Horum pudet me, Christi quae causa sponsi / Suffero’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 76). Ecclesia’s fortitude is set in sharp relief against Pornapolis’s weakness, who collapsed when told of her downfall. ‘Telum, oratione una / Nullum potentius. machina ipsum haec perrumpit / Coelum. Illorum inferre est, nostrum ferre iniusta: / Sors quippe haec sanctorum, & victoria est. Christi / Nisi adventu, haec extingui bellua haud quita est: … / Quae fero, Christi causa quum fero, lubens ferre … / Illius / Sunt stigmata: suam is causam pro arbitratu / Vindicet’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 77–8). ‘Stigmata haec, si nescitis, gemmae / Meae sunt unionesque unicae, Sponsi / Quae causa circumfero’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 79). ‘Sponsus iam imminet foribus. Sedes / Videte positas, & apertos libros, Vestes / Porrò delapsas, sponsa queîs sese exornet / Ad nuptias’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 80). ‘Hierusalem vidi novam, coelo / Descendentem, à Deo paratam uti sponsam / Viro ornatam suo’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 81). ‘Sponsa / Novo in hoc tibi nunc ut places synthemate?; Sponso / Postquam placeo, mihi nunc demu placeo’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 82). ‘Tempus fortasse haud longum est … / Satham cum Christo totis / Ut Pugnat copiis, ubique terrarum / Hodie, ut cum aliàs maximè. Agnus at

Notes 193 vincet / Triumphans tandem agnique sponsa: Pseudamno / Rumpantur licet ilia’ (Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 85).

Chapter 3 1

2

3

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John Bale, The First Examinacyon of the worthye servaunt of god Mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre / latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the Romysh popes upholders (Marburg, 1546); John Bale, The Lattre Examinacyon of the worthye servaunt of God mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre, latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the wycked synagoge of Antichrist (Marburg, 1547). Hereafter, First Examinacyon or Lattre Examinacyon. When jointly referred to, the Examinations. According to this Act, ‘no wooman nor artificers prentises journeymen servingmen of the degrees of yeomen or undre, husbandemennor laborers’ were to ‘pryvatelie or openlie’ read the English Bible. It allowed for ‘noble wooman and gentlewooman’ to read the Bible, but only ‘to themselves alone and not to others’ (Statutes of the Realm, 34 and 35 Hen. 8, c.1). In the First Examinacyon, Askew names some men to whom ‘she is affecyoned’, considered by her to be ‘men of wysdome’, ‘lerned, and of godlye judgement’. These include Edward Crome, John Huntingdon, an unidentified ‘Syr Gyllam’ (possibly the king’s physician Sir William Butts), and David Whitehead (Bale, First Examinacyon, 12v, 17v). It is clear that Askew knew Crome and that she was considered a great supporter of his (Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation During the English Reformation: The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44, 2 [April 1993]: 236). John Guy suggests that Crome was Askew’s ‘teacher’ (John Guy, Tudor England [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 196). Latimer is known to have been a friend of Crome’s, and Askew asks to be allowed his counsel in the Lattre Examinacyon (23v). John Lascelles was also a friend of Crome’s as well as a correspondent of Askew’s, and was burned alongside her. As Diarmaid MacCulloch observes in his biography of Cranmer, Askew, Lascelles and Cranmer were all members of the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire gentry; Askew probably knew the archbishop, and her brother Edward was one of his servants. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 353–4. This date is confirmed in the records of the City of London Record Office (CLRO, Repertory 11, 174v). According to Charles Wriothesley, the Windsor Herald, Askew was also arrested briefly in June 1545, but she does not mention this in her examinations (A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors. From AD 1485 to 1559, by Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, ed. William Douglas Hamilton [London: Camden Society, 1875], I, 155–6). Askew was apparently asked about her connections to the Countesses of Suffolk and Hertford, and Ladies Denny and Fitzwilliam, and she was

194 Notes

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9 10

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told that the king believed she could reveal the names of many of her ‘sect’. She confessed under torture that two men who had brought her money in prison had told her they were sent by Lady Denny and Lady Hertford, but that she could not confirm that this was the truth (Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 41v–43r). Both Shaxton and Lascelles had been arrested in June for their part in counselling Edward Crome, the month before, against publicly recanting his faith. Crome, following their advice, instead of his scheduled recantation delivered an evangelical sermon (recorded by an observer, British Library MS Harleian 425, 65r–66r). In the aftermath of this, in danger of his life, he revealed the names of his counsellors, including Lascelles, Shaxton, Latimer, Robert Wisdom (who fled to the continent) and Dr Huick, one of Henry VIII’s physicians (Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1542–47, ed. J. R. Dasent [London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890], I, 424, hereafter APC; Letters & Papers Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie [London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1862–1932], XXI, i, 898; XXI, ii, 790, 810, 823, 835, 848, hereafter L&P). Crome, having delivered up his friends to the Privy Council, subsequently performed a ‘sincere’ recantation in June, at around the time of Askew’s condemnation and torture. The connection between Crome’s recantation and Askew’s torture was made at the time by the evangelical Otwell Johnson in a letter to his brother, John, dated 2 July 1546 (L&P, XXI, i, 1180). For detailed information about the several early editions see Elaine Beilin, ed., The Examinations of Anne Askew (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xlv–xlix. Foxe appears to have used Bale’s 1550 edition of the Examinations as his source. Adrian van Haemstede printed a translation of the Examinations in his De Gheschiedenisse ende den doodt de vromer Martelaren (Emden, 1559), which follows Bale (without elucidation and in Dutch), but for one exchange between Askew and Gardiner, which is not found in Bale (Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1169, 1171). Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 49–50. This document was acquired by Bale in 1538, during his employment by John Leyland, as he was working on a history of the Carmelite order (Peter Happé, John Bale [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996], 35). It is included in a book in manuscript produced in 1439 by the Carmelite provincial and confessor to Henry V, Thomas Walden, the Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, held in the collection of the Bodleian Library (Bodleian MS Musaeo 86). The Fasciculi has been published in its original Latin as Fasciculi Zizaniorum magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, ascribed to T. Netter of Walden, ed. W. W. Shirley (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858). William Tyndale is credited with the editing and publication of this small book, which also contains the autobiographical examinations of William Thorpe (another Lollard examined and condemned by Arundel). William Tyndale, The examinacion of Master William Thorpe preste accused of heresye before Thomas Arundell / Archbishop of Canterbury … & The examinacion of the honorable knight syr Jhon Oldcastell Lorde Cobham / burnt bi

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14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22 23

the said Archbisshop / in the fyrste yere of Kynge Henry the fyfth (1530). Bale’s assertion regarding its original authorship is John Bale, A brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldecastell the lorde Cobham (Geneva, 1544), 3v. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 52. For example, in the Tyndale version a papist lawyer ‘put to him thes foure poyntes that folowe’ (Tyndale, examinacion, n.p.). In Bale’s version, the lawyer more dramatically pulls out a paper containing the four points, ‘thynkynge therby to make shorter worke with him. For they were so amased with his answers (not all unlyke to them which dysputed with Steven) that they knewe not wele how to occupye the tyme / theyr wyttes and sophistrye (as God wolde) so fayled them that daye’ (Bale, brefe Chronycle, 33v). Bale’s invention here serves two purposes: Oldcastle’s power of confession – his articulation of God’s Word – is seen to overwhelm his adversaries, their ‘wyttes and sophistrye’, and the Lollard martyr, like Askew would be later, is compared to St Steven, the proto-martyr of the primitive church. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 55r–v. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 2v–3r. Oldcastle’s 1414 rebellion did much to solidify the association in England, developing in light of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, between Lollardy (and thus heresy) and sedition, an association that would impede the efforts of both humanists and later Protestant reformers. See Aston, Lollards and Reformers, 2–10 passim. See Thomas Betteridge, ‘Anne Askewe, John Bale, and Protestant History’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997): 265–84, and idem, Tudor Histories of the English Reformation, 1530–83 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). As Betteridge argues, Bale appropriates both Oldcastle and Askew for his history: whether his project was in aid of ‘magisterial’ Protestantism, as Betteridge argues, remains debatable. Bale goes so far in establishing Oldcastle’s loyalty to king and country (against the background of his conviction as a traitor) as to invent for him a statement of loyalty – a written submission – to Henry V. Such a document appears in neither of Bale’s sources. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 13v. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 5r. This preoccupation with sexuality marks a striking difference between the legends of martyred men and those of women. See Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 5. On Bale’s use of Blandina, see Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 99–100. Bale, First Examinacyon, 7v. In this, Elaine Beilin contrasts Bale’s portrayal of Askew to her own. Askew, she argues, sees her self-confidence, wisdom and strength as deriving from her reading of scripture, and justifies her assertive behaviour by constructing herself as benefiting, by her knowledge of the Bible, from an immediate path to God. Beilin sees Askew as subversive, defying biblical and social restrictions placed on women, and fashioning her autobiography as the creation of a Protestant hero, of ‘intellect, assurance, and strength’. According to this interpretation, Askew does not

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30

31 32 33 34 35

consider God’s grace bestowed upon her because of her sex (Elaine Beilin, ‘A Challenge to Authority: Anne Askew’, in Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987], 29–34). Beilin sees Bale, on the other hand, regarding Askew primarily as ‘woman’, chosen and assisted by God because she is weak: ‘“thus choseth the lorde, the folysh of thys worlde to confounde the wyse, and the weake to deface the myghtye”’ (34). While arguing that Askew saw herself as aided by God because of her piety and constancy, Beilin reads Bale as considering Askew not just a weak woman given strength and wisdom by God, but a martyr who had to be divinely strengthened by God because she was a weak woman. Diane Watt also sees Bale as ‘concerned not with Askew as an individual but as a type of the godly woman’ (Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997], 107). Bale, First Examinacyon, 9v–10r. ‘& Attalum Pergamenum natione, qui semper nostrae ecclesiae columna fuerat & basis: & Blandinam, per quam Christus ostendit, quae apud homines vilia sunt, & obscura & contemptibilia apparent, magna Gloria apud deum digna haberi propter dilectionem erga se quam reipsa ostendunt, & non in specie tantum iactant. Cum enim omnes metueremus, & carnalis eius hera, quae; & ipsa una erat e numero decertantium martyrum, anxie vereretur, ne forte in confessione propter corporis imbecillatatem, non esset confidenter permansura, tanta est Blandina illa virtute replete, ut lassarentur & conciderent qui per vices illam … a mane ad vesperam usque torquebant, seque victos esse … mirarenturque quod adhuc spiritum traheret … Verum beata, tanquam generosa certatrix in confessione renovabatur … quoties dicebat, Christiana sum, nec mali quicquam a nobis committitur’ (Eusebii Pamphili Caesariae Palestinae, Ecclesiasticae Historiae, in Ecclesiasticae Historiae Autores [Basilae, 1549], Eusebius, V, i, 68). See for example: Luke 16: 15, and I Corinthians 1: 19–20. Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 196–8. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 46v. The failure to consider Bale’s male martyrology against the Askew texts lends itself to such mistaken conclusions as Diane Watt’s, when she categorizes Bale’s revulsion at the attempt to lure Askew into incriminating herself – ‘“Se how thys adversarye compaseth lyke a revenynge lyon, to devoure thys lambe”’ – as deliberately spotlighting her femininity (Watt, Secretaries of God, 108). Bale, brefe Chronycle , 3r. Also, in the Lattre Examinacyon: ‘Cast not afore in your myndes what answere to make. For I in that houre shall geve ye both utteraunce and wysdome, whych all your adversaryes shall not be habel to withstande, Luce 21’ (Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 3v). Bale, brefe Chronycle , 24v. Tyndale, The examinacion, n.p. Bale, brefe Chronycle , 41r. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 47r. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 57.

Notes 197 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

49 50

51

52 53 54

Bale, brefe Chronycle, 4v. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 7r. Bale, First Examinacyon, 6v–7r. As Peter Marshall has recently argued, while the ‘postulation of an unregenerate former self’ was a familiar theme in late medieval hagiography, increasingly, in evangelical sources of the early to mid-sixteenth century, ‘past “wickedness” was understood in terms of doctrine rather than personal morality’. This is certainly the case here. See Peter Marshall, ‘Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 9v. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 46r–v. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 9r. Bale, brefe Chronycle, 25v. Also, 26r, 37r, 39r. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 57–8. Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae Historiae, V, i, 68. Paula McQuade, ‘“Except that they had offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in the Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature & History 3, 2 (1994): 1–14. McQuade, ‘“Except that they had offended the Lawe”’, 7. Askew’s reticence is reminiscent of strategies for survival employed by the Lollards whose conventicles survived in London and elsewhere well into the sixteenth century. See Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 67. On Askew’s possible association with Lollardy, see John Davis, ‘Joan of Kent, Lollardy and the English Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33, 2 (1982): 233. Wabuda also discusses the strategies of Hugh Latimer, Robert Wisdom, Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett, William Jerome and Thomas Becon (Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation’, 224–5). On Lascelles’ and Latimer’s refusals to incriminate themselves, L&P, I, 823 (14 May 1546). As one of his supporters, at liberty in London at the time, Askew may have witnessed Crome’s final ‘false’ recantation of May 1546, as well as the Passion Sunday sermon which led to it. In 1531, for example, he had his own written statement of faith, produced under compulsion, printed for distribution as a means to reinforce his peers’ belief in his steadfastness, and he frequently lamented rumours of his submission. Bale, First Examinacyon, 1v–2r. Tyndale, newe Testament, c.lxxxiii(v). Tyndale’s first New Testament, printed in Marburg where the translator was in exile, was released in 1525 and began arriving in England in 1526, but the Henrician authorities successfully suppressed it. This was not the case, however, with the 1534 Tyndale New Testament, as the split with the papacy and accompanying focus on the problem of papism, coupled with Cromwell’s ascendancy in government, caused a relaxation in censorship of vernacular Scripture (Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 115). By the late 1530s, Tyndale’s 1534 New Testament was not

198 Notes

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59 60

61 62

63 64

only widely but also legitimately available, both as it stands alone and in its incorporation, with Old Testament translations by Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, into the royally licensed 1537 Thomas Matthews Bible, and then the 1539 ‘Great Bible’, or ‘Cromwell Bible’, a copy of which was placed, by law, in every parish church (Rex, 121; David Daniell, preface, The New Testament, trans. William Tyndale [The Text of the Worms edition of 1526 in original spelling], ed. W. R. Cooper [London: British Library, 2000], vii). The impact of Tyndale’s New Testament was, as Derek Wilson argues, incomparable: ‘it would be impossible to overestimate the influence of the new vernacular translation, and especially… prefaces and marginal notes setting forth the translator’s interpretations and contemporary applications of the Scriptures’ (A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England [London: Heinemann, 1972], 30). The English Bible read by Askew as a child, teenager, and until her death was unarguably the Tyndale translation in one of its manifestations. Tyndale, newe Testament, c.lxvii(r). Tyndale, newe Testament, c.lxxxiii(v). Bale, First Examinacyon, 3v. Tyndale, newe Testament, cc.liiii(v)–cc.lv(r). Paul, however, does not suggest that speaking in tongues is therefore wrong, nor does he recommend its abandonment. Tyndale, newe Testament, xxliiii(v)–xxlv(r). Askew continues to reveal her heretical divergence from Catholic orthodoxy throughout her questioning, both before the quest and throughout the Examinations. She challenges the priestly office; she refers to the spiritual nature of communion; she questions the efficacy of formal confession (Bale, First Examinacyon, 5r). She very provocatively expostulates against the importance of private masses – ‘I sayd, it was great Idolatrye to beleve more in them, than in the death which Christ dyed for us’ (6v), repeating herself with equal heat later, in front of Bonner: ‘O Lorde, what ydolatrye is thys? That we shuld rather beleve in private masses, than in the helthsom deathe of the dere sonne of God’ (10r). Tyndale, newe Testament, ix(v). Kimberly Coles, ‘The Death of the Author (and the Appropriation of her Text): The Case of Anne Askew’s Examinations’, Modern Philology 99, 4 (2002): 519; Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press), 41–2. Bale, First Examinacyon, 28v–29r. Askew rebukes a priest for counseling her that by speaking of religious matters she is violating Pauline strictures (Bale, First Examinacyon, 10r). In her rebuke, she misrepresents Paul in I Corinthians 14, or, as Matchinske has it, interprets him, to limit the bar on women speaking in congregation to the pulpit (Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State, 42). Bale goes even further than Askew in his defence of women’s participation in theological discussion, drawing on examples of women in the apostolic and primitive churches who openly disputed with superstitious bishops (10v–11r).

Notes 199 65 66

67 68

69 70

71 72 73

74 75

See Beilin’s comments on this passage (Beilin, ‘A Challenge to Authority’, 40). The Byble in Englyshe, xxxiii(r). This is so in both the 1537 Thomas Matthew’s Bible and the 1539 ‘Great’ Bible, placed in every parish church by order of Parliament, surely the bible Askew would have been reading in Lincoln Minster, when she was approached by priests, as described in the First Examinacyon (Bale, First Examinacyon, 33r). In the Vulgate Bible, the full proverb reads ‘Domus & sustantia possessio est patria, a Jehova autem est uxor intelligens’ (Sacrae bibliae. in quo continentur… [London: Thomas Betheletus, 1535], Proverbs 19: 14, n.p.). In a popular contemporary edition of Proverbs: ‘House & goodes come from the fathers by heritage: but a wyse wife is given of the lorde’ (The p[ro]uerbes of Solomon newly translated into Englyshe [London: Thomas Godfray, 1534], n.p.). Bale, First Examinacyon, 29r. Wisdom is known to have been close to Crome, and his arrest is linked in Privy Council records to Askew’s (APC, I, 424). For Wisdom’s connection to Crome, see Sherwin Bailey, ‘Robert Wisdom under Persecution, 1541–1543’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2 (1951): 184. Susan Brigden names Wisdom as among Askew’s supporters who, ‘for fear of death’, fled London at the time of her arrest (Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], 376). BL MS Harleian 425, 7v. The whole letter is 4r–7v. Bale fully articulated his aversion to strategic conformity in Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe (1543). Wabuda argues that he ‘rejected any use of equivocation or mental reservation’, suggesting that his influence may have led to Foxe’s withdrawing from later editions of the Acts and Monuments his ambivalent sympathy, expressed in the first, with those, like Crome, persecuted during Mary’s reign who had recanted during Henry’s (Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation’, 239). While Foxe allows his Marian martyrs to employ the sort of equivocation used by Askew in deflecting direct questions, he takes a firmer line – or has his martyrs doing so – when it comes to false recantation. For example, while the Marian martyr John Fortune’s self-authored examinations include a passage echoing (and clearly modelled on) Askew’s answers before the quest (AM, II, 2099), Rafe Allerton, also martyred during Mary’s reign, despises in his own written confession, which had previously earned him release, the dependency upon the broadly defined ‘Catholicke Church’ that Askew felt justified her own: ‘In the which I did not disclose my minde, but shamefully dissembled, because I made no difference between the true Church and the untrue Church’ (AM, II, 2208). Bale, Lattre examinacyon, 39v. Foxe’s treatment of the Askew Examinations are considered in Chapter 4. According to Foxe, Askew was offered the opportunity to recant in exchange for pardon at the stake immediately prior to her execution (AM, II, 1420). Bale, First Examinacyon, 38v. While the adjective ‘catholic’ could be interpreted as referring to the Roman Catholic Church, the word also denoted the universal Church of Christ –

200 Notes

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79 80

81 82 83 84 85

86 87

88

Protestants, while rejecting the Roman Catholic Church, considered themselves members of the true (small c) catholic church. Guildhall Library MS 9531/12, 109r. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 53r. Guildhall Library MS 9531/12, 109v. This admission inspired one Londoner to write to his brother of ‘Dr Crome’s canting, recanting, decanting, or rather double decanting’. See Otwell Johnson to his Brother John Johnson (London, 2 July 1546), L&P, XXI, i, 1180. Poignantly, Johnson then notes that Askew had received her judgment of the Lord Chancellor, ‘to be burned … the gentlewoman and the other man remain steadfast; and yet’, he continues, ‘she hath been racked since her condemnation (as men say), which is a strange thing in my understanding. The Lord be merciful to us all.’ Guildhall Library MS 3591/12, 44r. Robert Wisdom, ‘Revocatyon of that shamfull byll that Winchestre divised and Wisdome reedde at paules crosse in london on the relique Sondaye the xiiii daye of Julie Anno dom 1543’, Emmanuel College Library (Cambridge) MS 261, 88r–130v. Emmanuel College Library (Cambridge) MS 261, 92v–93r. Bailey, ‘Robert Wisdom under Persecution’, 187. For Becon’s public but very clearly false confession, see Guildhall Library MS 9531/12, 44r–45r. Emmanuel College Library (Cambridge) MS 261, 88r. If Askew wrote the two sets of Examinations herself, this conclusion lends itself to dating her authorship of the First. I would suggest that she must have composed or at least completed it following her condemnation in 1546, when she also wrote the documents comprising the Lattre. Had she written it following her first series of examinations, but before her second imprisonment, I do not believe she would have included in it the description of signing the confession. On the contemporary reaction to Crome’s submission, see Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation’, 237. Askew’s contrived answers before the quest, along with her ‘feigned’ recantation of 1545, are also reminiscent of strategies for survival employed by the English Lollards. Perez Zagorin suggests that the protoProtestant practices of dissimulation and pretended recantation, employed by Lollards (and the Alpine Vaudois) must have contributed to the sect’s long-term survival (Ways of Lying, 67). However, he argues, among the leaders of sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, such strategies of survival, which came to be associated with more radical reform movements like Anabaptism, were roundly condemned. While Zagorin thus does not locate the strategic use of dissimulation in England again until its adoption by Catholic recusants during Elizabeth’s reign, it is clear that use of the practice was widespread among English evangelicals during Henry’s reign, as it would be again during the Marian persecution. Eric Carlson marks Foxe as different from most of his contemporary reformers, who continued to see virginity, if kept, as superior to marriage. Robert Barnes, for example, the first English writer to devote a

Notes 201

89

90 91

92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

treatise to the subject (suppressed during Henry’s reign, it remained unpublished until Elizabeth’s), justifies marriage as preferable to whoredom, but below virginity in perfection. Carlson identifies as the only real exception, apart from Foxe, of this approach to clerical marriage (and celibacy) among the early English reformers, Thomas Becon, who wrote the introduction to Miles Coverdales’s translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s Der Christliche ehestand (as The golden booke of Christian matrimony [London, 1542]). Becon offers a passionate defence of marriage, consisting largely of accusing the celibate clergy of filthy whoredom, while exalting marriage as holy and clean. Carlson reckons Becon’s introduction ‘by far the most enthusiastic treatment of marriage by an Henrician writer, from that rarest of writers on the subject – one who was actually married’. He does not, however, consider Bale’s work, who began his systematic attack on clerical celibacy well before Becon (Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation, 56). As is often articulated in their abjuration records. See, for example, Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. Norman P. Tanner, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 20 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 57, 148, 160, 166, passim. See Chapter 2. While it may seem likely to the modern reader that a Protestant reformer would support the idea of a godly woman abandoning her Catholic husband rather than obeying him, in fact this was a thorny issue in Protestant circles, and reformers were sensitive to Catholic accusations that they encouraged women to such disobedience. See Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”’, 13–15, passim. Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 15r–v. Tyndale, newe Testament, cc.xlv(r). The passage reads, in the Vulgate New Testament: ‘si quis uxorem habet infidele quae consentiat ad habitandum cum eo, ne eam dimittito. Et uxor quae habet virum infidelem, qui consentiat ad habitandum cum ea, ne cum dimittito. Matitus enim infidelis sanctificatus est in uxore, & uxor infidelis sanctificata est in vito: alioqui certe liberi vesti impuri essent: nunc autem sancti sunt. At si infidelis ses separet, separatus esto: non est servituti subjectus frater aut soror in hujusmodi rebus: set ad pacem vocavit nos Deus’ (Sacrae bibliae, I Corinthians 7: 12–15, n.p.). Tyndale, newe Testament, cc.xliiii(v). John Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 2r. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 18v–19r. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 31v. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 64v–75r. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 34r. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 18r. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 18v. Bale, Actes of Englysh votaryes, 74r. I discuss published polemic attacking Askew on this basis in Chapter 4. Bale, First Examinacyon, 34v. Prior to the late seventeenth century, the word ‘conversation’ usually referred to manner of behaviour rather than verbal discourse (The

202 Notes

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971], I, 545). On honesty, see the OED (I, 1325) and, for example, Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 79, 112; also Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 6. Bale, First Examinacyon, 34v–35r. Bale, First Examinacyon, 36r. Bale, First Examinacyon, 35r. Bale, First Examinacyon, 37r–v. Bale, Actes, 5r. Bale, in describing Mary’s virginity, cites Luke 1. Bale, Image, II, liv(v)–lv(r). Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 7r–v. Bale, Image, I, Fvii(r–v). Bale, Image, I, Fviii(v), Gi(r). Bale, Image, I, Dviii(v). Bale, Image, I, Hi(v). Bale, Image, I, Hii(v); Bale, Lattre Examinacyon, 61r. Bale, Image, I, Hiii(r). Bale, Image, I, Hiii(v). Bale, Image, II, fviii(r). Bale, Image, II, gi(r).

Chapter 4 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Parts of this chapter were previously published as ‘Gospelling Sisters “goinge up and downe”: John Foxe and Disorderly Women’, Sixteenth Century Journal 35, 4 (January 2005). Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1168. ‘The formulation “Anne Askew’s Examinations” is actually a misnomer; the text we have might more properly be called Bale’s Examinations of Anne Askew or Foxe’s Examinations of Anne Askew, and so forth’ (Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1168). Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1179. Foxe is largely unsuccessful in his defence: see Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1181–5, passim. Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1188–90. I further explore Foxe’s attitude towards Elizabeth’s religious policy in Chapter 6. Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1194. Freeman and Wall argue convincingly that Foxe’s used the 1550 edition of the two Examinations as his base-text (‘Racking the Body’, 1171). Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1180. Freeman, ‘“The good ministrye of godlye and vertuouse women”’, 24–30. Freeman, ‘“The good ministrye of godlye and vertuouse women”’, 27. AM, II, 2167. The passage reads almost verbatim in the 1563 edition (1571) and in the 1583 (II, 1980). Roland H. Bainton, Women of the Reformation in France and England (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973), 211.

Notes 203 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 2, 79. Women did not have to behave in a disorderly manner to become subject to sexual insult; even the appearance of lightness was thought to signal sexual deviancy and thus dishonesty. See Levin and Sullivan, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, 6; Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power, 23; Linda Woodbridge, Women in the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 53. See, for example, Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’; Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present 13 (1958): 42–62. Wiesner, ‘The Reformation of the Women’, 208. Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 177; Roper, Holy Household. Roper, Holy Household, 1. See Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”’; and Wabuda, ‘Sanctified by the Believing Spouse’, 122. Bainton, Women of the Reformation, 211–12. Susannah Brietz Monta, ‘Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Sanctity of Transgression’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 25, 1 (2001): 7. Susannah Brietz Monta, ‘The Inheritance of Anne Askew, English Protestant Martyr’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte / Archive for Reformation History 94 (2003): 148. Marsha S. Robinson, noting Foxe’s use of both ‘a new female spirituality’ and ‘class transgression’ to support his history of the true church, nevertheless spots an ambivalence in his accounts by which he ‘underscores female limitations to advance his cause, through, for example, his reiteration of the phrase, ‘sillie poore women’ and his praise of God for turning such ‘weake creatures’ into (implicitly) male viragoes (Marsha S. Robinson, ‘Doctors, Silly Poor Women, and Rebel Whores: the Gendering of Conscience in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John King [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002], 239–41. AM, II, 2249. AM (1563), 1680; AM, II, 2120. AM, II, 2067. AM (1563), 1567. AM, II, 2219, 2232. AM, II, 2202. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 29. AM, II, 1710, 1712. AM, II, 1735. AM, II, 1965, 2208. AM, II, 1671. AM, II, 1891. While I agree that Foxe’s stories are more earthy and less tending toward the miraculous than Eusebian martyrology, I challenge,

204 Notes

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37

38

39

40

here, Knott’s suggestion that in Foxe’s stories, ‘there is no odor of sanctity … and no sense of being transformed by the presence of Christ. Foxe’s emphasis is on the heroic faith of the individual and the poignancy of the scene rather than on the fusion of human and divine’ (Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 46). See Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 280. Carole Levin suggests that Foxe’s presentation of women was ‘an effective guide to women readers about appropriate behavior patterns’, adding that his ‘positive examples’ of women of strength both reinforced and modified the traditional female virtues: modesty, humility, sweetness and piety. Levin does not discern a consistent pattern in Foxe’s broad depiction of women–and helpfully flags up the difficulties involved in trying to do so–but she does suggest a model according to which the deaths of unruly women offered a salutary lesson in survival: importantly, in offering this model, she uses examples both of women who, however laudable, were not martyrs – or even would-be martyrs – and women who were (Carole Levin, ‘Women in the Book of Martyrs’). Ellen Macek, in 1988, used Foxe’s work to attempt to trace the spiritually transformative nature of martyrdom itself as a liberating experience for women. Thus her study concerns more the women described by Foxe themselves than his depiction of them. Macek suggests that the female martyrs undergo a process of spiritual growth, at the same time experiencing a ‘moral liberation’ from the gendered constraints of their society. She reconciles to what she sees as his misogyny Foxe’s transmission of these stories of female ‘subjectivity’ by suggesting that he failed to acknowledge the ‘spiritually and morally liberating nuances’, of his women’s experiences, due to his own ‘ambivalence towards women in his accounts, his patriarchal expectations for female roles, and his early promotion of a new Protestant ethic of marriage’ (Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs’, 65). In effect, Foxe told stories about liberated women because he did not realize that they were liberated, and his misogyny is amply demonstrated by his suggestion that the ‘“womanyshe and wyvishe hartes”’ of his female martyrs gained ‘“a bolde and manlye stomacke” though divine aid’ (65). Robert Parsons (Persons), born in 1546, was an Oxford fellow (Baliol) until leaving England in 1574 for the Jesuit Seminary in Louvain. He missionized England with Edmund Campion (beginning in 1580), set up a secret printing press and encouraged Philip II to invade England. His treasonous activity alienated the English Catholic gentry, so he returned to the continent and became rector of the English College at Rome, where he died in 1610. Robert Parsons, The Third Part of a Treatise intituled of Three Conversions of England: Conteyninge an examen of the Calendar or Catalogue of Protestant Saintes, Martyrs and Confessors, devised by Fox … by N.D. (St Omer: 1604), X, xi, 491–2. Parsons, Three Conversions, X, xiv–xv, 494–6.

Notes 205 41

42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

John Christopherson, An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion … (London: John Cawood, 1554), T.ii.v–iii.r. The dangerous inversion of order accompanying Protestantism is highlighted in the shoulder-note aside this passage: ‘of wives to their husbandes’. Miles Huggarde (or Hoggarde) is a mysterious figure. He was a London hosier during Mary’s reign, but his dates are unknown. Despite his obscurity, the Displaying of the Protestants was the most successful piece of anti-Protestant propaganda of Marian England (Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 303). Miles Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestantes (London, 1556), 47r. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 74r. Huggarde continues, appalled: ‘yea & one of them with anothers woman, taking it (as it is thought) for a brotherly love’. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 74v–75r. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 75v. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 76v–77r. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 77r–v. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 77v–78r. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 79r–v. Nicholas Harpsfield (1519?–74) was an Oxford-educated theologian. He lived in exile in Louvain during Edward VI reign, but returned to England on the accession of Mary as archdeacon of Canterbury, in which office he took part in a number of interrogations of Marian martyrs. Elizabeth I imprisoned him in the Tower of London in 1559, where he remained until shortly before his death, but from where he published the Dialogi Sex. ‘Liber seditiosus contra regimen feminarum ab Evangelica schola profectus’ (Nicholas Harpsfield [as Alan Cope], Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus, Monasticae Vitae, Sancgtorum, Sacrarum Imaginum Oppugnatores, et Pseudomartyres [Antwerp: Christophori Plantini, 1566], 747). ‘… quia mulieri fas non fit imperare’. ‘Sed mirum est videre praeposterasistas rationes, ac inversam Foxi tui prudentiam’ (Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, 747). See Chapter 3. However, as Freeman and Wall point out, while in the 1563 Acts and Monuments Foxe does not mention Askew’s marriage at all, in the 1570 edition he adds a marginal note next to the question from the Privy Council about her husband: ‘Concerning that which they demaunded as touching M. Kime, read in the Censure of Ioh. Bale writing upon this place’ (Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’, 1180–1). Winchester College. BL MS Harleian 425, 142r. AM, II, 2199–2200. AM, II, 2200. Despite her survival of the Marian persecution, Young is described expressing a willingness to die for her faith. Foxe’s depiction of her under persecution is consistent with that of those who burned. AM, II, 2268. AM, II, 2269.

206 Notes 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91

92

AM, II, 2270. AM, II, 2270. AM, II, 2272. AM, II, 2272. AM, II, 2247. AM, II, 2247. AM, II, 2248. AM, II, 2248. AM, II, 2248. Parsons, Three Conversions, XV, xxi, 254. Parsons, Three Conversions, XV, xxi, 258. BL MS Harleian 421, 142r–143r. Gouch’s name, however, is scratched out wherever it appears. Does this indicate a discomfort on a reader’s part with his appearance and John Dryver’s disappearance? While this scratching out lends itself to speculation, the copy is in Foxe’s hand, and his failure to omit the fact of the haystack incident in the Acts and Monuments is suggestive. If his motive was to eradicate the Gouch problem from the Dryver story, he could have chosen to delete the name from his copy, or again to omit either Gouch or at least the haystack incident from his narrative. AM, II, 2202. Parsons, Three Conversions, XII, xxvi, 126. Parsons, Three Conversions, XII, xxxi, 129. AM, II, 2139. AM, II, 2214. Parsons, Three Conversions, XIII, xxxiii, 161–2. Parsons consistently dismisses the possibility that the women martyrs have the intelligence to understand their own assertions (e.g. Parsons, Three Conversions, V, liv, 226; VI, xcvi, 337–8; see discussion of Dryver, above). Parsons, Three Conversions, XII, xxxi, 129; XXII, xxvi, 126; XIII, xxxi, 160; VIII, xlv, 445. AM, II, 2206. AM, II, 2207. AM, II, 2277–8. AM, II, 2167–8. Parsons, Three Conversions, X, xxxii, 510. Thomas Harding, born in 1516, was a fellow of New College, Oxford and its warder under Edward VI. He converted to Catholicism upon Mary’s inheritance and left England for Louvain during Elizabeth’s reign. He died there in 1572. Thomas Harding, A Reioindre to M. Jewels Replie against the Sacrifice of the Masse: In which the doctrine of the Answere to the .xvii. Article of his Chalenge is defended, and further proved, and al that his Replie conteineth against the Sacrifice, is clearely confuted, and disproved (Louvanii: Joannem Foulerum, 1567), 184v. Harding, A Reioindre, 185r. Harpsfield approaches the issue from a different angle, criticizing, without naming Massey, women who will not turn from their heresy even when pregnant, and who thus sacrifice their

Notes 207

93

94 95 96 97

98

99 100 101 102

103 104 105

unborn children: ‘Feminae vero aliquot praegnantes refervatae, partu edito, nulla ratione aut admonitione ab hac infania deduci potuere. Quare post omnia frustra tentata, ignibus cum maritis iniectae sunt, ad quos laetae ac canentes properabant’ (Harpsfield, 753). Foxe’s defence has been checked and verified. See D. M. Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1996). AM, II, 2131–2. AM, II, 2133. AM, II, 2131. AM, II, 2133. Foxe’s explanation failed to satisfy his enemies: Robert Parsons continued the attack on Perotine Massey, suggesting that by identifying a husband for his martyr, Foxe had, while exonerating her of simple fornication, proven her guilty of adultery (Parsons, Three Conversions, XI, liii, 100). This makes her very different from women martyrs described, for example, in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des vrays tesmoins (1570). Crespin has little compunction about showing male martyrs abandoning their families on the road to martyrdom, but according to a recent study by Nikki Shepardson, ‘such abandonments are not described, much less celebrated in the same manner, in the accounts of the female martyrs’ (Nikki Shepardson, ‘Gender and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des vrays tesmoins’, Sixteenth Century Journal 35, 1 (Spring 2004), 166. AM, II, 2249. AM, II, 2249. The reference here is to sexual honesty, which Prest, as is revealed in her answer, understands. AM, II, 2250. Christ says to the disciples in Matthew 10, ‘When they persecute you in one cite / flye in to another’ (Tyndale, newe Testament, xiiii[v]). AM, II, 2251. AM, II, 2252. These documents are in the Devonshire Records Office in Exeter: Turberville’s Register is in Chanter 18 (it is microfiched as MFC4/7/3–7); the Deposition Records of the Bishop’s Consistory Court are Chanter 855.

Chapter 5 1 For discussion of fears in Oxford, see Charles Edward Mallet, The History of the University of Oxford (London: Methuen & Co., 1924), II: ‘The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, 59–60, 66, 74, 79–80; also, V. H. H. Green, A History of Oxford University (London: B.T. Batsford, 1974), 39. 2 ‘sed de aliis quoque, siqua istic apud vos iuventutis fo essent feraciora. Ut nunc ubique sunt omnia feracissima …’ (BL MS Lansdowne 388, 82r). 3 ‘Non omnia quae splendent, gemmae illico. Denique qua parte calceus hic me permit, hedleie, nescis. Satis mihi hae rationes omnes utrinque deliberatae sunt ne me putes juvenilem temeritatem potius quam judicium sequi.

208 Notes

4

5

6 7 8

9

Consilium tuum haud unquam aspernor. Sed non eadem omnium minerva est, non idem genius, non natura similes. Et tu forsitan me non meo animo sed tuo potius metatus es … praeterea michaelis iam festum appetit, et nosti statuti nostri decretum, neque libuit mihi hoc anno circumcidi’ (BL MS Lansdowne 388, 117r). ‘Hominis iugenium ac mores non tam probo quam admiror, quo nunquam in vita quicquam vidi magis candidum ac magis aureum. Nec minus illa placet capiti suo respondens per omnia familia talis qualem optare queam’ (BL MS Lansdowne 388, 119r–v). ‘Fyrst, you see now your doinges so wicked can not be hid, your cruelty is come to light, your murthers be evident, your prety practises, your subtyle sleightes, yor secrete conspiracies, your fylthy lives are sene, and stincke before the face both of God and man. Yea, what have you ever done so in secrete and in corners, but the Lorde hath founde it out, and brought it to lyght? You holde, maintayne, and defend that Ministers ought and may lyve sole without matrimony: what filthynes and murthering of infantes followeth therupon, your eare confessions can saye something, but God knoweth more. And yet the world knoweth so much, that I nede not here to stand upon any particular examples of Cardinals, Doctors, and others, taken in manifest whoredome at London, at Oxford, and Cambridge, at Chester, and other places mo … But to passe over thys styncking Camerine of your unmaidenly lives, I returne again to your murthers and slaughters’ (AM [1563], Biiii[v]). AM, II, 1317. AM, II, 1331. As Helen Parish has noted, Bale created the strong association between necromancy and the imposition of clerical celibacy, ‘reflecting his desire to use this issue to chart the influence of Antichrist in the church’ (Parish, Clerical Marriage, 125). Bale focuses much more than Foxe on the pontificate of Sylvester II, who was pope in AD 1000 (the loosing of Satan) and, like Gregory VII, apparently, a sorcerer. AM, I, 225–6. Hildebrand’s papacy is repeatedly criticized in the Acts and Monuments as a crucial culprit in the history of the Roman church’s increasing corruption. In the preface, ‘To the true and faythfull Congregation of Christes Universall Church’, Foxe describes the struggle of the church to maintain some semblance of ‘truth and veritie’, largely through the preaching of good ministers: ‘till time of Pope Hildebrand called Gregory vii … And of Pope Innocentius iii … By whom altogether was turned upside downe, all order broken, dissipline dissolved, true doctrine defaced, Christen fayth extinguished … Whatsoever the Byshop of Rome denounced, that stode for an oracle … whatsoever was contrary, ibso facto it was heresy, to be punished with fagot and flammyng fire. Then began the sincere faith of this English Church, which held out so long, to quayle. Then was the clere sunne shine of gods word overshadowed with mistes and darknes, appearing like sackcloth to the people, which neither could understand that they read, nor yet permitted to read that they could understand’ (AM , I, Aiii[v]). The reference to sack cloth is an allusion to Revelation 6, in which it is prophesied that with the opening of the sixth seal (which heralds, to Foxe and Bale, the final age), among other portents, the sun will blacken to the colour of sack cloth.

Notes 209 10 AM, I, 227. 11 The conflict between Gregory VII and Henry IV turned on both pope and emperor claiming the right to depose the other. Henry declared the pope deposed following the latter’s interference in the appointment of the Bishop of Milan (1976); Gregory excommunicated Henry in response, and the stand-off resulted in the emperor’s submission in January, 1077. However, Henry eventually regained the upper hand, took an army into Italy, and set up an antipope by whom he was (re-) crowned Emperor; Gregory fled and died in exile in 1085 (H. G. Koenigsberger, Medieval Europe, 400–1500 [Essex: Longman Group UK, 1987], 165–7). 12 AM, II, 1332. 13 AM, II, 1133. 14 AM, II, 1295. The Proclamation threatened the loss of their livings to clergy who had already married and prohibited future clerical marriage on pain of imprisonment. 15 The Six Articles, first passed as law in July 1539, made adherence to a number of Catholic doctrinal points and regulations of clerical life compulsory. The first two articles concern the Eucharistic Sacrifice, affirming that the Real Presence of Christ’s body exists in both the bread and wine of the Sacrament, and confirming the efficacy of communion in one kind for the laity. The third and fourth articles address clerical celibacy, affirming that priests may not marry, and that vows of ‘chastity or widowhead’ should continue to be observed. The fifth and sixth articles confirm the expedience and necessity of both private masses and auricular confession. Deniers of the first article are to be burned as heretics, while those denying any of the latter five, as well as married priests, should hang as felons. Those attempting to leave the realm in order to avoid prosecution are to be executed as traitors: hung, disemboweled while still alive, and drawn and quartered. (The Act and its penalties is 31 King Henry VIII.) An addendum modifying the articles specified punishment for fornicating priests, who lost their goods and spiritual promotions, but one, for the first offence; forfeited all possessions to the king for the second; and for the third, suffered indefinite imprisonment. 16 AM, II, 1296. Foxe does not mention Mary in this sentence in the 1563 edition (AM [1563], 586). 17 This is not the case in the 1563 edition, in which there is only a four-page summary, followed by the history of the Thomas Cromwell (AM [1563], 586–9 [589 wrongly paginated as 598].) In his discussion of the Act in the 1570 edition, 16 folio pages are devoted to disproving transubstantiation, while 22 support the marriage of priests. Following the itemized refutation of the articles, Foxe continues to rant against the banning of priestly marriage, and the resulting whoredom of priests, and the issue invades discussion of other points: for example, much of Philip Melanchton’s letter to Henry VIII, included in Foxe’s discussion of auricular confession, is devoted to chastising Henry for the Articles’ condemnation of clerical marriage. 18 AM, II, 1325. 19 AM, II, 1326. 20 AM, II, 1326. 21 AM, II, 1345.

210 Notes 22 AM, II, 1345. 23 Not only does he tell the story in his narrative, he also isolates it in a preface as particularly beastly evidence of the hatred and cruelty of the papists (AM , I, iiii.r). This is the only continental story included in his first edition that he did not take from Heinrich Pantaleon’s Latin martyrology, but rather from a French source, Jean Crespin’s Histoire Memorable de la Persecution & saccageme ˘t du people de Merindol & Cabriers & autres circo ˘uoisins, appelez Vavdois (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1556 [first edition, 1555]). 24 Crespin, Histoire Memorable, 12–18. 25 In the 1563 edition, with no shoulder-note: ‘avaunte thou lady Herodias, thou unshamfast and dishonest harlot, is it thy part to open thy mouthe to talke in this company? Doest thou wel understand and knowe what the crime or offence againste the devine and humayne magesty is, it were thy parte to be contented rather then to disire to have the innocent bloode shed’ (AM [1563], 632). 26 AM, II, 1076–7. 27 Foxe’s attack on the Roman church through the shoulder-notes responding to Crespin’s French whore is echoed elsewhere both in the Acts and Monuments and other of his opus. The synonymy of lusts for blood and for sex is a constant theme in Christus Triumphans, the apocalyptic comedy discussed in the previous chapter, as it is in a later work, The Pope Confuted (1580), which opens: ‘Howe long at the length wil you abuse our gentle sufferaunce, ye Pope of Rome? Howe long shall your fury and counterfeyte ypocrisie delude us: What kynde of inordinate licentiousnes is this, that so much distempereth you? … have you so shamefully shaken off all shamefastnes’ (John Foxe, The Pope Confuted: the Holy and Apostolique Church confuting the Pope, Englished by James Bell [London: Thomas Dawson for Righard Sergier, 1580], A.f). In this latter work Foxe repeatedly calls the Roman church a ‘Babylonicall strumpet’, characterized by ‘insatiable savageness’, who also bewitches Christian princes with her ‘abhominable fornication’ (B6f, A2f). 28 AM, II, 1080. 29 AM, II, 1085. 30 For a recent discussion, see, for example, Catherine Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 31 Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 5. 32 The dominance of the virgin in ancient female martyrs’ Vitae survives in early medieval Latin martyrology as well as in the vernacular English martyrology of the later Middle Ages, in which virgin martyrs are the most popular of the female saints outnumbering reformed prostitutes and celibate wives combined. This is so of the most popular late medieval martyrology, the thirteenth-century Legendum Aurea of Jacobus Voragine (translated into English as the Golden Legend by William Caxton), in which of 41 female saints (out of 200 individuals, not including groups such as St Ursula’s 11,000 virgins), a mere five have been married. (Jacobus de Voragine, the Archbishop of Genoa, wrote the Legenda Aurea during the mid-thirteenth century, c. 1258–70.) Of the late medieval hagiography written in English, apart from Caxton’s Golden Legend, Osbern Bokenham,

Notes 211

33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51

in his fifteenth-century Legendys of Hooly Wummen, included ten virgin martyr legends, but only two lives of married women saints and one of Mary Magdalene; six of the seven lives of female saints in the North English Legendary are virgin martyr legends, as are 13 of the 22 female Vitae in the South English Legendary. See Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 11. See also Charlotte D’Evelyn, ‘Saints’ Legends’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. J. Burke Severs (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970), II, 561–635. Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 24. Ashton, 2. Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“St Peter did not do thus”’, I, 5 (print version). Matthias Illyricus Flacius, Ecclesiastica Historia, integram Ecclesiae Christi ideam quantum ad locum, propagationem … per aliquot studiosos et pios viros in urbe Magdeburgicæ (Basle, 1564 [1561–74]), cent IIII, xii, 1411 (Oo2[v]). ‘Iam dederat prius indicium / tendere se Patris ad solium / nec sua membra dicata thoro: ipsa crepundia reppulerat, / ludere nescia pusiola;/ spernere sucina, flare rosas, / fulva monilia respuere, / ore severa, modesta gradu,/ moribus et nimium teneris / canitiem (caniciem) meditata senum’ (Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, ‘Hymn in honore scen Eulalie ugis & martyris’, Opera Aurelii clementis prudentii [Seventer: Pattroed, c. 1490], Pi[r]). AM, I, 130. Genialis can also mean ‘the marriage bed’. ‘Eugenia prudentissima virgo dixit. Utinam ad me etiam ista dei sententia pervenisset, ut nunque suscipiam hominis mortalis sponsionem’ (Jacobus Philippus Bergomensis, ‘De sancta Eugenia virgine & martyre’, in De Claris Mulieribus: De Memora Bilibus et Claris Mulieribus: Aliquot Diversorum Scriptorum Opera [Paris: Simonis Colinaci, 1521], 72v). AM, I, 104. Flacius, Ecclesiastica Historia, cent IIII, xii, 1410 (Oo2[r]). This is perhaps inevitable, as Agnes’s story is dominated by her tribulations in the stews where she is sent as punishment for refusing to worship at the altar of Minerva. Agnes prays for assistance from Christ, who, as she puts it, will not suffer the ‘golden and pure chastity’ to be violently taken from ‘those that be his’. Eventually, a young man who looks upon her nakedness is struck by lightning and killed, and Agnes, still a virgin, is executed by sword. Interestingly, Foxe sandwiches this particular story between declarations of scepticism as to the miracles so prevalent in the ancient stories. ‘Duplex corona est praestita martyri / Intactum ab omni crimine corpus est / Mortis deinde gloria libere’ (‘Passio Sancte Agnetis virgis et martyris’, Opera … Prudentii, Ov[r]). AM, I, 131. ‘Eterne rector divide ianuas / caeli obseratas terrigenis prius / ac te sequentem christe animam voca. / con virginalem tum Patris hostiam’ (‘Passio sancta Agnetis’, Opera … Prudentii, Ovi[v]). AM, I, 132. AM, II, 1708–9. AM (1563), 1117. AM, II, 2030. AM, II, 1879.

212 Notes 52 AM (1583), II, 1679. 53 I say this in the awareness that some medieval male mystics, like Francis of Assissi , referred to themselves in terms suggesting spousal relationships with Christ. Hagiographers, however, reserved such language for women (see Catharine Mooney, ‘Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity’, in Catherine Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 11–12). I am also aware of the work of John Kitchen, who, scolding the ‘common tendency’ to regard the holy women who reject their husbands as being the sole ‘brides of Christ’, suggests that a marital relationship between male saints (in the case of his work Merovingian) and Christ can be extrapolated from rhetoric of spiritual battle: i.e. saints carrying the cross ‘follow’ the Bridegroom. Kitchen also suggests that all saints who rejected matrimony should be regarded as brides of Christ (John Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 108–9). My interest, however, is in what the hagiography says, and I have found no ancient or medieval vita of a male saint in which he is said to have married Christ. The closest parallel is in Caxton’s Golden Legend: during the time of Charlemagne there was a clerk devoted to the Virgin Mary, who decided to marry. On his wedding day, having remembered that he had neglected to say Matins and the Hours in her honour, as was his habit, he sent his bride home and remained in the church: ‘& whan he cam to this Antheme Pulchra es et decora filia hierusalem. That is to saye thou arte fayre & gracyous doughter of Jherusalem / anone appered tofore hym the gloryous virgyn Marye with two aungels on eyther syde / & sayd to hym. I am fayre & gracyous / wherfore levest thou me & takest thou another wyfe / or where has thou seen one more fayrer than I am. And the clerke answered. Madame thy beaute surmounteth all the beaute of the world / thou arte lyfte up above the hevens / & above the aungelles / what wylt thou that I do. And she answered & sayd yf thou wylte leve thy wyfe flesshely / thou shalte have me thyn espouse in the realme of heven …’ (The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints of Jacobus de Voragine, Englished by William Caxton [London: Wynken de Worde, 1510], xlvii.r). 54 AM, II, 1727–8. 55 AM, II, 1781. 56 AM (1583), II, 1679. 57 AM (1583), II, 1398. 58 AM, II, 1936. 59 AM, II, 1752. 60 AM, II, 2002. 61 AM, II, 2097. 62 AM, II, 2123. 63 AM, II, 1862–3. 64 AM, II, 1771. 65 As Gregory notes, Thomas More in a letter to his daughter Margaret describes the Carthusians awaiting execution in 1535 as ‘“cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage”’ (Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 258).

Notes 213 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78

79

AM (1563), 1543. AM (1563), 1542. AM (1563), 1544. AM (1563), 1544; AM, II, 2128. The baby, who in the 1563 edition ‘was burned with the sely Mother, Graundmother, and Aunt, very pitifully to behold’ (AM [1563], 1544), also gains martyr status in the 1570: ‘And so the infant Baptised in his owne bloud, to fill up the number of Gods innocent saintes, was both borne and dyed a Martyr, leaving behind it to the world, which it never saw, a spectacle wherein the whole world may see the Herodian crueltie of this graceles generation of Catholicke tormentors’ (AM , II, 2129). Here Foxe refers his reader back to Volusianus. AM, II, 2131–2. AM, II, 2134. Foxe’s argument here is reminiscent of an earlier critique of female monasticism in the Acts and Monuments, in which he praises Pope Pius II (1458–64) for dissolving the orders of St Bridget and St Clare, thus ‘byddyng them to departe oute. That they should burne no more, nor cover a harlot under the vesture of Religion’ (AM , I, 821). The harlot under the visor, both the priest’s concubine in Merindol and the baby-murdering nun in the convent, is a type of the Roman church herself. In the 1570 edition: ‘A notable example, wherein may appeare as well the despite of D. London, and other Papistes agayst the Gospellers, as also the fidelitie of a matrone towardes her husbande’ (AM, 1408). AM (1563), 626. In the 1570 edition, ‘what truth & trust is to be looked for’. AM (1563), 627. This was a request for the enjoyment of clerical privilege, earned by learning. AM (1563), 627. This passage is extended in the 1570 edition. After praising the matron for favouring her husband’s life over her own good name and reputation, Foxe continues: ‘As touchyng the qualitie of this facte or periurie, I intermedle not here to discusse, but leave it at large to the judgement of Lawyers to define upon. Truth it is that periurie neither in man nor in woman is to be commended, neither ought to be defended. But yet the true hart & faithful love between thys man & hys wife, conterpeasing agayne as much or more on the other side, the more rare and Straunge I see it in many couples nowe a dayes, the more I thinke it worthye not only to be praysed, but also for example like to be notified’ (AM , II, 1408). The matron’s faith is never discussed by Foxe. The description of Mrs Calaway’s heroic testimony changes slightly in the 1570 edition: ‘she tooke an othe before the Judges, that she was not Bigama, and that she was never marryed to moe men than to the sayd Goldsmith: and although she had children by her other husband, and continued divers yeares with him, yet she sware that she was never married unto him’ (AM, II, 1408). The number of the matron’s prior relationships is now specified – there was only one – and the word ‘whore’ is omitted altogether, which suggests a deliberate attempt on Foxe’s part to maintain the point of the story, while lessening the emphasis on the matron’s misconduct, a response perhaps to Catholic attacks on evangelical women’s sexual honesty. It is also possible that that during the period between the first and second editions’ publication, Foxe received either

214 Notes further information, or a response from the Calaway family, prompting the alteration. Even with these alterations, Mrs Calawy is a problematic case, certainly not an ‘ideal’ of virtuous womanhood according to any sort of expected standard.

Chapter 6 1 It seems that Foxe was distracted from writing the second volume by the task (imposed on him by Peter Martyr) of translating Cranmer’s book on the Lord’s Supper (never published) and by the news from England of the first Marian martyrdoms, beginning with the burning of John Rogers on 4 February 1555. It soon became apparent that the work could not end with the death of Henry VIII; thus a new project was conceived (Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 119–20). 2 Grindal, a Cambridge graduate, had been a chaplain to Edward VI, Canon of Westminster from 1552 until Mary’s accession and his exile. He was made Bishop of London on his return to England, becoming Archbishop of York in 1570, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1575. He was stripped of his jurisdictional authority in this office by Elizabeth, for refusing to suppress ‘prophecyings’, gatherings by more ‘puritanical’ clergy members. He died in 1583, still unreconciled to his queen. 3 Loades, Oxford Martyrs, 263. 4 This is not, however, the first martyrology to include accounts of the deaths of Marian martyrs. Jean Crespin was the first to publish information (as martyrology) about the Marian burnings, using as his source martyrs’ letters circulating among the exiles in Geneva (Jean Crespin, Troisieme partie du recueil des martyrs [Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1556]). Foxe did not, however, draw on Crespin’s work for the Rerum, probably because it is in French, which he did not read. See David Watson, ‘Jean Crespin and the First English Martyrology of the Reformation’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). 5 Foxe copied from Pantaleon’s Latin work rather than from national vernacular martyrologies, avoiding complicated translation. Thus, whereas Pantaleon drew for his martyrology on books by Rabus (German), Crespin (French), von Haemstäede (Dutch) and other sources, Foxe translated (word-for-word) into English Pantaleon’s Latin translation of these vernacular sources. While Pantaleon’s work was released later in 1563 (September) than Foxe’s first edition (which came out in the spring), Foxe clearly used Pantaleon, which suggests that his friend sent him a manuscript version of the printed text. This backs up Pantaleon’s claim that he continued the 1559 Latin project with Foxe’s approval, which is also supported by the fact that his volume comes from the Oporinus press. The only continental martyr story that Foxe tells in the 1563 edition which does not come from Pantaleon is the Merindol massacre (see Chapter 5), copied from Crespin’s Histoire Memorable (1555). Crespin had initiated exchange with Foxe in 1560: despite having been the first to publish information on the Marian burnings (in 1556), most of his Quatrieme partie des actes des martyrs (1560) is direct French translation of Foxe’s 1559 Rerum.

Notes 215

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23

I am indebted to Tom Freeman for sharing with me some of his insight into Foxe’s exchanges with his continental friends. As suggested in Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church, 19. Thomas Betteridge, ‘From Prophetic to Apocalyptic: John Foxe and the Writing of History’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (London: Scholar Press, 1997). In response to rumours that Norfolk was planning to wed Mary Queen of Scotland, Foxe had written to him in 1569 in an attempt to dissuade him (BL MS Harleian 416, 154r). Following the duke’s attainder for treason, Foxe remained with him at his request until his execution, and, with Alexander Nowell, accompanied him to the scaffold. Norfolk left Foxe a legacy of £20 per annum, which he received for the rest of his life. The prebend, worth just under £40 per year, provided Foxe’s main income for the rest of his life. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 36. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 45. Dickens, The English Reformation, 396. Dickens, The English Reformation, 397. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 47; Mozely, 137. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 48. Foxe resided with Gilby in Frankfort, and had been friends with Crowley, like Nowell and Humphrey, since their years together at Magdalen. He developed a close relationship with Pilkington in Basle. Pilkington is the only signatore on Dudley’s list eventually to receive a bishopric – Durham – and in 1572 he would present Foxe with a prebend in Durham cathedral (Foxe resigned it after only one year). Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 60. As Collinson notes, only one high-ranking Elizabethen ecclesiast (Grindal) ever had the courage to tell Elizabeth ‘to her face’ that as a bishop of Christ’s Church he was subject to power higher than her. The result was his suspension from the highest-ranking church office in the country, the Archbishopric of Canterbury. William Turner was another Marian exile and one of Foxe’s friends and correspondents. Thomas S. Freeman, ‘John Foxe: a Biography’, in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Online Variorum Edition: Introductory Essays (www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/ apparatus/ introessays. html), 8 (print version). Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 85. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 88. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 89. See, for example, Whittingham’s (pseudonymous) translation of Theodore Beza’s The treasure of trueth, to which is attached treatises on predestination by both Foxe and Gilby. In his, Gilby poses the singularity of God’s laws over ‘his creatures’, as well as the role of preachers in expressing them: ‘shal it not bee most necessarye to haue Preachers & Teachers, to tell vs the same, and to admonishe vs wherevnto we be called, seeing of our selues and our owne reasons no such thing can be perceyued … Thus serueth then exhortations, dehortations, comminations, and publycations

216 Notes

24

25

26

27

28 29

of the lawes and wyll of our Lorde God: that hee maye bee knowne the Lord and gouernour ouer all the thynges hée hath created, and the onely lawe maker amongst his creatures, publyshing vnto all that perfecte equitie and iustice, which ought in no case to be resysted’ (The treasure of trueth touching the grounde worke of man his saluation…Whereunto are added, these godly treatises. One of the learned and godlie Father. Maister I. Foxe…The other of Maister Anthonie Gylbie [London: J. Charlewood for Thomas Woodcocke, 1576], Rv[v]–Rvi[r]). Foxe also participated in and wrote the preface to John Field’s translation of A commentarie of M. Doctor Martin Luther vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians first collected and gathered word by word out of his preaching, and now out of Latine faithfully translated into English for the vnlearned. Wherein is set forth most excellently the glorious riches of Gods grace (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1575). Imprisoned for a time following publication of the Admonition, and banned from preaching, Field produced this translation of a text by the father of ‘godly prince’ theology, but in the process, as Richard Duerden argued in a paper (‘Radical Luther: John Foxe, John Field, and the Translation of Luther’) at the 2004 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, departed from his source text in instructive ways, in effect borrowing Luther’s authority to support his twin beliefs that a corrupt church cannot retain its authority, and that justification—elect status—invites subversion by the godly against a bad church. My thanks to Professor Duerden for allowing me to refer to his as yet unpublished paper. See Catharine Davies, ‘“Poor Persecuted Little Flock” or “Commonwealth of Christians”: Edwardian Protestant Concepts of the Church’, in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1987). Davies ‘persecuted flock’-Protestants overlap to an extent with the men identified by Alec Ryrie as early English ‘covenant-theology’ reformers, who he sees opposing the more Lutheran, ‘godly prince’ evangelicals in 1540s Henrician England. When ‘forced to choose between king and Bible’, Ryrie notes, they ‘knew where their final loyalties lay’ (Alec Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, 1 [January 2002]: 86). ‘Gestant enim legittimum gladium, quem nobis nullo pacto ipsis è manibus extorquere licet, quibus adeo omnem obedient iam praecipit christiana professio’ (John Foxe, De non plectendis morte adulteris consultatio [London: Hugh Syngleton, 1548], Aiiii[v]). ‘sed cur illam appellamus veterem, nisi recentior subiisset lex, cui par est priorem cedere? Alioqui si nihil arbitrentur in rebus hujusmodi mutatum esse, cur duo ædita sunt testamenta? Cur non prius perduravit, si nihil in eo inesset, quod à succedente posteriore antiquari oportuit?’ (Foxe, De non plectendis, Bi[r]). ‘Verum cur tum Jesus patriæ legis secutus iudicium, non iussit lapidari adulteram manifestariam?’ (Foxe, De non plectendis, Bi[v]). ‘Cur Paulus incæstum excommunicatum Corinthiis restituit? Cur idem palam profitetur nos mortuo prorsus priore marito, in legittimo coniugio nupsisse alteri … Quamobrem si nos iam secundo marito nupsimus, nimirum à priore sævitia in alterius testamenti ius ac lbertatem traducti.

Notes 217

30

31 32 33

34

35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Cur tum superiores constitutiones revocamus, veluti à Christo ad Mosen?’ (Foxe, De non plectendis, Bi[v]–ii[r]). Catharine Davies and Jane Facey, ‘A Reformation Dilemma: John Foxe and the Problem of Discipline’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 39, 1 (January 1988): 46. Davies and Facey, ‘A Reformation Dilemma’, 39. Parker had approved Foxe’s publication of the Reformatio, but found himself betrayed by its preface. The ‘plan to revive and authorize Cranmer’s revision of the canon law … was a symbol of dissatisfaction with the Church settlement, and it was a sure sign of the cast of mind which was now labeled Puritanism; significantly, Scots Protestant politicians and church leaders, including John Knox, took a lively interest in its republication’ (MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 610–11). Susan Felch, ‘Shaping the Reader in the Acts and Monuments’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (London: Scholar Press, 1997), 57. Felch, ‘Shaping the Reader’, 60–2. The choice of Foxe to deliver this sermon is interesting. Warren Wooden suggests that it marks the esteem with which he was held by the Anglican Church establishment, as well as by the common people (Warren Wooden, ed., The English Sermons of John Foxe: Facsimile Reproductions with an introduction [New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978], vii). However, given the problem of Puritan dissent and noncomformity within the church, and both Foxe’s fame and his known association with the early Puritan movement, might not his selection also have been a savvy exercise in public relations? Both Lawrence Humphrey and Thomas Sampson were appointed to preach at Paul’s Cross at Easter, 1565, despite their recognition as leaders of nonconformity during the vestments controversy (and at a time when Archbishop Parker was planning their deprivation). Alternatively, selecting Humphrey and Sampson in 1565, and Foxe in 1570, if the appointments were engineered by Grindal, might have reflected his personal sympathy with their cause. John Foxe, A Sermon of Christ crucified, preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, commonly called Goodfryday: Written and dedicated to all such as labour and be heavy laden in conscience, to be read for their spirituall comfort (London: John Daye, 1570), Aiii(r). Foxe, Christ Crucified, 3r. Foxe, Christ Crucified, 11r. Foxe, Christ Crucified, 26v. Foxe, Christ Crucified, 26r. Foxe, Christ Crucified, 28r. Foxe, Christ Crucified, 56v. David Loades, ‘John Foxe and the Godly Commonwealth’, in David Loades, John Foxe: Essays 1 (Oxford: the Davenant Press, 2001), 11. David Loades, ‘John Foxe and the Traitors: the Politics of the Marian Persecution’, in Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 231.

218 Notes 46 See Loades, ‘John Foxe and the Traitors’, 232. 47 See Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Anthony Milton, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: the Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Ken Fincham (London: Macmillan, 1993). 48 Dickens, The English Reformation, 396. 49 While agreeing that Queen Mary was a Jezebel, Foxe probably disapproved of Knox’s assertions against female rule itself: a letter to the Scot following publication of the First Blast resulted in a vaguely apologetic response. Knox’s letter to Foxe is BL MS Harleian 416, 70r (‘my rude veangencie and misconsidered affirmations which may appear rather to precead from color than of zeal and reason, I do not excuse … To me it is enough to say that black is not white and mans tyranny and foolishness is not goddess perfict ordinance’). Knox considered all three Marys – Tudor, Guise and Stuart – Jezebels (First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women [Geneva, 1558], 24v, 42r, passim). He dismissed these women rulers on the basis that their feminine souls were infused with the spirit of Jezebel (see Paula Louise Scalingi, ‘The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1516–1607’, The Historian 41, 1 [1978]: 66–7). There is no reason to think that Foxe’s letter to Knox, which unfortunately does not remain extant, expressed opposition to the principle of resistance itself. 50 See Chapter 4. 51 AM (1563), 1670; AM, II, 2247. 52 AM (1563), Table, n.p. 53 AM, II, 2297–8. 54 Freeman and Wall, ‘Racking the Body’. 55 AM, I, Aiii(r). 56 AM, II, 49. 57 ‘Let every soul be subject to the governing authority, for there is no authority except from God. The powers that be are ordained of God’. 58 Gerry Bowler, ‘Marian Protestants and the Idea of Violent Resistance to Tyranny’, in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (London and New York: Croom Helm, 1987), 124. 59 Bowler, ‘Marian Protestants’, 127. 60 Bowler, ‘Marian Protestants’, 128–9. Unlike Bale, the author of Certain Questions appeals to the commonality to rise up against the tyrant Mary, as the nobles and Parliament had both assented to her treason (130). 61 John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power … (Strassborg: 1556), Gix(r). 62 Two of Foxe’s closest friends also wrote political treatises, Anthony Gilby and Lawrence Humphrey. Gilby agreed with Knox, Ponet and Goodman that it was not just a right but a duty of nobles, as well as the commons if necessary, to rise up against tyranny. Humphrey focused on convincing the nobility to use their influence to bridle tyranny. See Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church, 186–8. 63 John Foxe, Ad Inclytos ac Praepotentes Angliae Proceres Supplicatio (Basle: Oporinus, 1557).

Notes 219 64 ‘Tum à vobis, Illustrissimi Heroes, qui sublimiori in his terries gradu ad Illum propius acceditis, multo magis idem sanè ab omnibus expectari convenit, maxime etiam sentiri hoc tempore necessarium.’ 65 The supplication in the 1563 edition is AM (1563), 1506–13. Henceforth I will cite from the 1570 edition. 66 AM, II, 2082. 67 AM, II, 2082. 68 AM, II, 2085. 69 AM, II, 2082. 70 AM, II, 2084. 71 AM, II, 2086. 72 AM (1563), 1737. 73 Turberville, or D’Urberville, but called by Foxe, Troubleville. 74 AM, II, 2249. 75 See, for example, John Cashmere, ‘The Social Uses of Violence in Ritual’, European History Quarterly 21, 3 (1991): 291–319; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivari in Sixteenth Century France’, Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 41–75; S. Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 391–419; Ingram, ‘Ridings, Rough Music and Mocking Rhymes’; D. Rollison, ‘Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village, 1660–1740’, Past and Present 43 (1981): 70–97. 76 Susan C. Karant Nunn, ‘The Reformation of Women’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, third edn, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard and Merry E. Wiesner (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 184–7. 77 Amussen, An Ordered Society. Sarah Hanley sees this occurring in France through the promulgation of new laws governing marriage, and Joel Harrington, for Germany, through enhanced enforcement of existing laws. See Sarah Hanley, ‘Family and State in Early Modern France: the Marital Law Compact’, in Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, second edn, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quartaert (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 78 See Amussen, An Ordered Society, and Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 37. Also, Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), xi, 221. This was so at least on a rhetorical level. As Hardwick notes in her study of the ‘middling sort’ in France (her focus is notaries and their families), however, ‘in a society that was ideologically and rhetorically fiercely patriarchal, many individual instances show that women and subjects had considerable room to maneuver’ (226). On patriarchal thought in early modern England, see also Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975). 79 See Merry E. Wiesner, ‘The Early Modern Period: Religion, the Family, and Women’s Public Roles’, in Religion, Feminism, and the Family, ed. Anne Carr

220 Notes

80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 150–2. What Carole Pateman calls ‘traditional patriarchal thought’ assumed that ‘the family, and the authority of the father at its head, provided the model or the metaphor for power and authority relations of all kinds’, assimilating all power relations into paternal rule (Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract [Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988], 23–4). See also Schochet, Patriarchalism, 16. I discuss in Chapter 4 of this book the reaction of Catholic polemicists to the actions of women Protestants, particularly as described in Foxe’s martyrology, but during the 1560s the Elizabethan establishment was faced with its own opposition by unruly women, since, as Collinson notes, ‘it was the women of London who occupied the front line in defence of their preachers, and with a sense of emotional engagement hardly exceeded by the suffragettes of three and a half centuries later’. Grindal, bemoaning the ‘womanish brabble’, retreated before a group of 60 women who, enraged at the suspension of yet another St Giles Cripplegate preacher (John Bartlett), confronted him at his house in 1566; similarly, when Gough and Philpot crossed London Bridge to begin their provincial exile that same year, they were escorted by something between twoand three hundred women offering support. This unhappy, ambivalent Bishop of London, and later even unhappier Archbishop of Canterbury, seems to have been regularly accosted, at least verbally, by women Puritans, and, importantly, of the separatists imprisoned in 1568, the women outnumbered their male counterparts (Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 93). AM, II, 2250. Freeman, ‘“St Peter did not do thus”’, II, 11 (print version). Davis, ‘Women on Top’, 131. Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power, 7. Davis, ‘Women on Top’, 147. Shepardson, ‘Gender and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom’, 167–70. Ponet, Shorte Treatise of Politike Power), Miiii(r). Ponet (1514–56), Bishop of Winchester for Edward VI, was the highest-ranking ecclesiast of the Marian exiles, and the first English reformer to advocate tyrannicide. He died in exile. Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, 52. Anne Wentworth, A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (London, 1677), 4.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5

AM, I, 49. Mullaney, ‘Reforming Resistance’, 242. Mullaney, ‘Reforming Resistance’, 243–5. AM, II, 2250. Timothy Bright, An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monumentes of the Church: written by that Reuerend Father, Maister Iohn Fox: and now abridged by Timothe Bright, Doctour of Physicke, for such as either through Want of Leysure, or Abilitie have not the Use of so Necessary an History (London: I. Windet, 1589).

Notes 221 6 Clement Cotton, The Mirrour of Martyrs in a Short View Lively Expressing the Force of their Faith, the Fervency of their Love, the Wisedome of their Sayings, the Patience of their Suffrings, etc… (London: T.P., 1613). 7 Thomas Mason, Christs Victorie ouer Sathans Tyrannie. Wherin is contained a Catalogue of all Christs Faithfull Souldiers that the Divell either by his Grand Captaines the Emperours, or by his most Deerly Beloved Sonnes and Heyres the Popes, have most cruelly Martyred for the Truth (London: George Eld and Ralph Blower, 1615). 8 Thomas Mall, A Cloud of Witnesses, or, The Sufferers Mirrour made up of the Swanlike-songs (London: Robert Boulter, 1665); Martyrologia Alphabetike, or an Alphabetical Martyrology containing the Tryals and Dying Expressions of many Martyrs of note since Christ: extracted out of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the Church … (London: R. Butler, 1677); Samuel Clarke, General Martyrologie, containing a Collection of all the Greatest Persecutions which have befallen the Church of Christ, from the Creation to our Present Times wherein is given an exact Account of the Protestants Sufferings in Queen Maries Reign (London: William Birch, 1677); Ellis Hookes, The Spirit of the Martyrs Revived in a Brief Compendious Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages and Living Testimonies of the True Church, Seed of God, and Faithful Martyrs in all Ages (London, 1682). 9 Carole Levin, ‘Lady Jane Grey: Protestant Queen and Martyr’, in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), 92. 10 Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Church of England, of the Progess made in it during the Reign of K. Henry the VIII (London: TH, 1679), 341. 11 Bright, An Abridgement, II, 69–70. 12 See Damian Nussbaum, ‘Whitgift’s Book of Martyrs: Archbishop Whitgift, Timothy Bright and the Elizabethan Struggle over John Foxe’s Legacy’, in John Foxe: an Historical Perspective, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 13 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 170–1. 14 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 158–64. 15 This is with the exception of Askew and Grey (discussed above) and with the witty, one-sentence entry on Elizabeth Folkes: ‘Elizabeth being examined if she beleeved not that Christs body was in the Sacrament Substantially, and really, yes sayth she I beleeve it is a reall lye, and a substantiall lye indeed’ (Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 73). 16 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 82. 17 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 89–90. 18 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 90–1. 19 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 111. 20 Cotton, Mirrour of Martyrs, 118. 21 Parsons, Three Conversions, X, xxxii, 510. 22 Hookes, The Spirit of the Martyrs, 164. 23 Benden’s story is Bright, An Abridgement, II, 230–2; Mason, Christs Victorie, 332; Mall, A Cloud of Witnesses, 15–16; Clarke, General Martyrologie, 483–4; Hookes, The Spirit of the Martyrs, 164–5. She is not included in the Alphabetical Martyrology.

222 Notes 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Bright, An Abridgement, II, 258. Mall, A Cloud of Witnesses, 250; Alphabetical Martyrology, 137. This is the version in Mall (A Cloud of Witnesses, 250). In an interesting twist, Thomas Brice’s doggerel verse, A Briefe Register, fails to mention Dryver at all, instead pairing Gouch with Elizabeth Launson. See A Briefe Register in meter, containing the names and patient sufferings of the Martyrs & members of Jesus Christ, afflicted … in the time of Q. Marie (London: Simon Stafford, 1599), n.p. (November 1558). See Monta, ‘Foxe’s Female Martyrs’, 6–7. Monta, similar to Bright, allows this passage to dominate her analysis of Dryver’s examinations as they appear in the Acts and Monuments. Bright, An Abridgement, II, 256. Clarke, General Martyrologie, 504. Mall also includes, very briefly, an exchange from her first examination, in which she argues that a sacrament is a sign, and cannot be the thing signified (i.e. Christ’s body). Parsons, Three Conversions, XIII, xxxii, 161–2. AM, II, 2139. Clarke, General Martyrologie, 481. Hookes, The Spirit of the Martyrs, 159. AM, II, 2269. Thomas Mall, A Cloud of Witnesses, or, The Sufferers Mirrour made up of the Swanlike-songs … the third part (London: Robert Boulter, 1665), 211. Mall, A Cloud … the third part, 212–13. Mason, Christs Victorie, 207. Mason, Christs Victorie, A3r–v. Mason, Christs Victorie, 364–5.

Select Bibliography of Works Cited Primary sources in manuscript British Library Harleian 416–26, 590, 783 British Library Lansdowne 334, 353, 388–9, 819, 1045 British Library Add(itional) 19400 Devonshire Public Records Office (Exeter) Chanter 18 (1552–9), 855 (1556–62) London Guildhall Library MS 9531/10, 12 Emmanuel College Library (Cambridge) MS 260–62.

Printed primary sources Bale, John, A brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldecastell the lorde Cobham. Geneva, 1544. —— The Actes of Englysh votaryes, comprehendynge their unchaste practices and examples by all ages, from the worldes begynnynge to thys present yeare, collected out of their owne legends and Chronycles. Wesel, 1546. —— The First Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of god Mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre / latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the Romysh popes upholders. Marburg, 1546. —— The Lattre Examinacion of the worthye servaunt of God mastres Anne Askewe the yonger doughter of Sir Wyllyam Askewe knyght of Lyncolne shyre, latelye martyred in Smithfelde by the wycked synagoge of Antichrist. Marburg, 1547. —— The Image of both churches, after the most wonderful and heavenly revelacion of Saincte John the Evangelist. Contaynyng a very frutefull exposition or paraphrase upon the same. Wherin it is conferrd with the other scripturs, and most authorized histories. Compiled by John Bale an exyle also in this lyfe for the faithfull testimony of Jesu. London: John Wyer, 1550. Bergomensis, Jacobus Philippus, De Claris Mulieribus, in De Memora Bilibus et Claris Mulieribus: Aliquot Diversorum Scriptorum Opera. Paris: Simonis Colinaci, 1521. Brice, Thomas, A Briefe Register in meter, containing the names and patient sufferings of the Martyrs & members of Jesus Christ, afflicted … in the time of Q. Marie. London: Simon Stafford, 1599. Bright, Timothy, An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monumentes of the Church: written by that Reuerend Father, Maister Iohn Fox: and now abridged by Timothe Bright, Doctour of Physicke, for such as either through Want of Leysure, or Abilitie have not the Use of so Necessary an History. London: I. Windet, 1589. Burnet, Gilbert, The History of the Church of England, of the Progess made in it during the Reign of K. Henry the VIII. London: TH, 1679. The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy scrypture, bothe of the olde and newe testament, truly translated after the veryte of the hebrue and Greke textes, by the dylygent studye of dyverse excellent learned men, expert in the forsayde tonges. London: Rychard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, 1539. 223

224 Bibliography Christopherson, John, An exhortation to all menne to take hede and beware of rebellion. London: John Cawood, 1554. Clarke, Samuel, General Martyrologie, containing a Collection of all the Greatest Persecutions which have befallen the Church of Christ, from the Creation to our Present Times wherein is given an exact Account of the Protestants Sufferings in Queen Maries Reign. London: William Birch, 1677. Cotton, Clement, The Mirrour of Martyrs in a Short View Lively Expressing the Force of their Faith, the Fervency of their Love, the Wisedome of their Sayings, the Patience of their Suffrings, etc. London: T. P., 1613. Crespin, Jean, Histoire Memorable de la Persecution & saccageme˘ t du people de Merindol & Cabriers & autres circo ˘ uoisins, appelez Vavdois. Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1556. Eusebius, Bishop of Palestine, Ecclesiasticae Historiae, V, i, in Ecclestiasticae Historiae Autores. Basel, 1549. Foxe, John, De non Plectendis Morte Adulteris Consultatio. London: Hugh Singleton, 1548. —— De Censura sive Excommunicatione Ecclesiastica. London: Hugh Singleton, 1551. —— Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum maximarumque per totam Europam persecutionum a Wiclevi temporibus ad hanc usque aetatem descriptio. Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihelius, 1554. —— Christus Triumphans, Comoedia Apocalyptica. Basle: Joannes Oporinus, 1556. —— Ad Inclytos ac Praepotentes Angliae Proceres Supplicatio. Basle: Joannes Oporinus, 1557. —— Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum, quae postremis et periculosis his temporibus evenerunt, maximarumque per Europam persecutionum, et sanctorum Dei martyrum, caeterarumque rerum si uae insignioris exempli sint, digesti perregna et nationes commentarii. Pars Prima, in qua primum de rebus per Angliam et Scotiam gestis, atque in primis de horrenda sub Maria nuper regina persecutione narratio continetur. Basle: Joannes Oporinus, 1559. —— Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching matters of the church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romish prelates, specially in this realm of England and Scotland, from the year of our Lord 1000 unto the time now present; gathered and collected according to the true copies and writings certificatory, as well of the parties themselves that suffered, as also out of the bishops’ registers which were the doers therof. London: John Daye, 1563. —— A Sermon of Christ Crucified, preached at Paules Crosse the Friday before Easter, commonly called Goodfryday. Written and dedicated to all such as labour and be heavy laden in conscience, to be read for their spirituall comfort. London: John Daye, 1570. —— The Ecclesiasticall History contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes of thynges passed in every kynges tyme in this Realme especially in the Church of England principally to be noted, with a full discourse of such persecutions, horrible troubles, the suffering of Martyrs, and other thinges incident, touching aswel the sayd Church of England as also Scotland, and all other foreine nations, from the primitive tyme till the reigne of K. Henry VIII. London: John Daye, 1570. —— Papa Confutatus. London, 1580. Englished by James Bell in 1580. —— Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, with an Vniuersall history of the same, wherein is set forth at large the

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232 Bibliography McCusker, Honor, ‘Books and MSS Formerly in the Possession of John Bale’, The Library 4, 16 (1936): 144–50. —— John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary. Bryn Maur, PA, 1942. McEachern, Claire, ‘“A Whore at First Blush Seemeth only a Woman”: John Bale’s Image of Both Churches and the terms of Religious Difference in the Early English Reformation’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 25, 2 (Spring 1995): 245–69. —— and Debora Shuger, eds, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McGinn, Bernard, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought. New York: Macmillan, 1985. McQuade, Paula, ‘“Except that they had offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in the Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature & History 3, 2 (1994): 1–14. Milton, Anthony, ‘The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: the Demise of a Jacobean Consensus’, in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Ken Fincham. London: Macmillan, 1993. Monta, Susan Brietz, ‘Foxe’s Female Martyrs and the Sanctity of Transgression’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 25, 1 (2001): 3–22. —— ‘The Inheritance of Anne Askew, English Protestant Martyr’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte / Archive for Reformation History 94 (2003): 134–60. Mooney, Catherine, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mozley, J. F., John Foxe and His Book. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1940. Mullaney, Steven, ‘Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Nunn, Susan Karant, ‘The Reformation of Women’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, third edn, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard and Merry E. Wiesner. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. —— ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, Sixteenth Century Journal 13, 2 (1982): 17–42. Nussbaum, Damian, ‘Whitgift’s Book of Martyrs: Archbishop Whitgift, Timothy Bright and the Elizabethan Struggle over John Foxe’s Legacy’, in John Foxe: an Historical Perspective, ed. David Loades. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Olsen, V. Norskov, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973. Ozment, Steven, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Parish, Helen L., Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent, Policy and Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: The Polity Press, 1988. Reeves, Marjorie, The Prophetic Sense of History in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. Robinson, Marsha S., ‘Doctors, Silly Poor Women, and Rebel Whores: the Gendering of Conscience in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John King. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

Bibliography 233 Roper, Lyndal, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. —— Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Ryrie, Alec. ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, 1 (January 2002): 64–92. Scalingi, Paula Louise, ‘The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1516–1607’, The Historian 41, 1 (1978): 59–75. Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Schochet, Gordon, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Scott, Joan Wallach, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75. —— Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Shagan, Ethan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Shepardson, Nikki, ‘Gender and the Rhetoric of Martyrdom in Jean Crespin’s Histoire des vrays tesmoins’, Sixteenth Century Journal 35, 1 (Spring 2004): 155–74. Spreadbury, Jo, ‘The Gender of the Church: The Female Image of Ecclesia in the Middle Ages’, in Gender and Christian Religion: Papers Read at the 1996 Summer Meeting and the 1997 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. R. N. Swanson. London: The Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1998. Stone, Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. Stuard, Susan, ‘The Domination of Gender: Women’s Fortunes in the High Middle Ages’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European Society, second edn, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Susan Stuard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Thomas, Keith, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present 13 (1958): 42–62. Todd, Margo, ed., Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism. Oxford: The Clarendon University Press, 1987. Underdown, David, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Wabuda, Susan, ‘Equivocation and Recantation During the English Reformation: The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44, 2 (April 1993): 224–42. Wabuda, Susan, ‘Sanctified by the Believing Spouse: Women, Men and the Marital Yoke in the Early Reformation’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

234 Bibliography Watson, David, ‘Jean Crespin and the First English Martyrology of the Reformation’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1997. Watt, Diane, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Wiesner, Merry, ‘Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys’, in Feminist Theology: A Reader, ed. Ann Loades. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1990. Wiesner, Merry, ‘The Reformation of the Women,’ in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Sonderband: Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationem und Debatten, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel in collaboration with Hans Füglister. Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 1998. —— ‘The Early Modern Period: Religion, the Family, and Women’s Public Roles’, in Religion, Feminism, and the Family, ed. Anne Carr and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996. Wilson, Derek, A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England. London: Heinemann, 1972. Wiltenburg, Joy, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Winstead, Karen A., Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Woodbridge, Linda, Women in the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana, IL and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Wooden, Warren W., John Foxe. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Zagorin, Perez, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Index Abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 164–79 Achetes, 118–19 Act for the Advancement of True Religion (1543), 1, 42, 193n2 Act of Royal Supremacy (1534), 1 Act of the Six Articles (1539), 1, 42, 43, 53, 104, 108, 110, 209n15 Act of the Six Articles (1554), 4, 104 Act of Succession (1534), 1 Act of Uniformity (1559), 132, 133 Adso of Montier-en-Der, 21–2, 188n20 Agnes, Saint, 115, 117 Alexander VI, Pope, 157 Allerton, Ralph, 81 Allin, Rose, 88–9, 90, 91, 92, 94 Alphabetical Martyrology (anon.), 164, 172, 173, 174, 175 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 107–8, 127 Antichrist, 19–22, 27–32, 69, 105, 124, 131, 146, 147, 162, 188n30 in John Foxe, Christus Triumphans, 36–41 Aristotle, 24 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 44 Askew, Anne, 14–15, 42–72, 78, 82–4, 92, 93–4, 95, 97, 99, 157, 159, 200n85 Examinations of Anne Askew, 12, 15, 42–72, 73–5, 79, 87, 137, 162–3, 198n60, 198n64 in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 165–6, 167–8, 170, 175, 177–8 Askew, Edward, 42 Askew, Jane, 42 Askew, Martha, 42 Askew, William, 42 Athalia, 144, 150 Attalus, Saint, 48 Augustine of Hippo, 20–1, 22, 147 Austoo, James, 94–5, 174, 178 Austoo, Margery, 94–5, 174, 178 Babylon, Whore of, 20, 36 see also Revelation, Book of

Bale, John, 4, 15–16, 18–35, 39, 40, 41, 42–72, 73–4, 80, 83, 87, 124, 128, 133, 137, 150, 162 education and early career, 15–16 on clerical celibacy, 11, 24, 26–33, 62–72 on divorce, 62–67 Actes of the Englysh Votaryes (1546), 45–6, 64–8 Brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Johan Oldescastell the lorde Cobham (1544), 12, 44–5, 49–52, 72, 137, 162 sources for, 44–5 Examinations of Anne Askew (1546–7), see under Anne Askew, Examinations Faithful Admonition of a Certain True Pastor (1554), 148–9 Image of Both Churches (1541–7), 8, 11–12, 18–34, 44, 46, 64, 67, 69–72, 103, 105, 137, 160, 189n36 sources for, 19–23, 187n7, 187n14 Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brittanniae…Catalogus (1557–9), 16 Bangeor, Agnes, 168 Banks, John, 97, 191 Barnes, Robert, 22, 200–1n88 Bartlett, John, 136 Becket, Thomas, 45 Becon, Thomas, 61, 200–1n88 Behrer, Augustine, 81 Benden, Alice, 97, 99 in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 169–71 Bergomensis, Jacobus Philippus, 116–17 Blackstone, Chancellor to Bishop of Exeter, 100, 154–5, 172 Blandina, Saint, 47–9, 52 Bocher, Joan, 84, 85 Boleyn, Anne, Queen of England, 1 Bonner, Edmund, Bishop of London, 43, 53, 59, 60, 63, 67–8, 90, 95, 165, 171 235

236 Index Book of Common Prayer (1552), 132, 133, 139 Bradford, John, 119, 164 Bright, Timothy, 164, 171–9 Brigit, Saint, 65 Brown, Elizabeth, 75 Bull, Henry, 75 Burnet, Gilbert, 165 Calais, 145 Calaway, William, 125–6 Calaway, wife of, 125–6, 127, 142, 213–14n79 Cardmaker, John, 120 Carver, Dirrick, 120 Catherine of Aragon, Queen of England, 1, 2 Cauches, Catherine, see Guernsey martyrs Cecil, William, 131, 134 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 133 Cholmley, Roger, 90, 176–7 Christopherson, John, Bishop of Chichester, 84 Clarke, Samuel, 164, 172–9 Coke, Edward, 178 Cole, Thomas, 132 Common Law, women under, 53 Cotton, Clement, 164, 167–72, 173–9 Coverdale, Miles, 134, 135 Cox, Edward, 133, 143 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 4, 14, 80, 85, 129, 139, 163 Crespin, Jean, 111, 129, 130, 158, 207n98, 214n4, 214n5 Crome, Edward, 42, 54, 60, 61, 193n3, 194n6 Cromwell, Thomas, 15 Crowley, Robert, 135, 136, 215n16 Dangerfield, William, 94, 174–5 Dangerfield, Joan, 94, 174–5 Dare, Christopher, 54 Daye, John, 5, 129 Dryver, Alice, 15, 91–4, 99, 102, 144, 147, 163 in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 172–4, 175, 177–8 Dryver, John, 93 Dudley, Guilford, 2 Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland, 2 Dudley, Robert, 134 Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 65

Eagles, George, 80 Ecclesia, 24, 35–41, 124, 127, 137, 160, 188n29 as the New Jerusalem, 18, 21, 23, 30–1, 32–3, 39, 103, 124, 141 see also Foxe, John, Christus Triumphans Edith of Wilton, Saint, 65 Edward VI, King of England, 2–4 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 2, 74, 129, 131, 135, 142, 151 Settlement of Religion (1559), 131, 133 English Bible, 55–7, 63, 197–8n54 See also William Tyndale Eugenia, Saint, 115, 116–17 Eulalia, Saint, 115–16 Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, 48–9, 52, 76, 78, 80, 82, 114 Eve, 35–6, 39 Exiles (English), 3, 132–3, 180n5, 181n13 see also Frankfort Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 16, 194n10 Field, John, 136, 137, 215–16n23 Fitzroy, Mary, Duchess of Richmond, 3, 15 Folkes, Elizabeth, 94 Foxe, Agnes, 3 Foxe, Elizabeth, 96–7 Foxe, John (of Stoke, Suffolk), 96–7 Foxe, John conversion, 3 Durham, prebend of, 5 education and early career, 3–5, 104–5, 180n6, 180–1n7 exile, 4–5, 128–9 John Bale’s influence on, 11–12, 15–16, 18, 24–5, 33–4, 39–41, 42, 72, 73–4, 103–4, 105, 129, 137, 160, 188–9n31, 194n8 Shipton, prebend of, 5, 131, 135 and Puritanism, 130–7, 215n16, 215–16n23 on clerical celibacy, 104–13 on marriage, 7–8, 105, 200–1n88 on Queen Mary, 144–7, 150–54 on Queen Elizabeth, 129, 130, 140, 144, 147, 157 Acts and Monuments, 3–6, 13–14, 24, 34–5, 42, 43, 73 passim Anne Askew in, 73–5, 87–8, 157, 166 prefaces to, 129–30, 140

Index 237 significance of, 5–7, 182n19–20 success of, 5, 130 veracity of, 13–14, 185–6n47 Ad Christum Anglorum Exulantium Eucharisticon (1558), 5 Ad Inclytos ac Praepotentes Angliae Proceres Supplicatio (1557), 4, 150–51 Christus Triumphans (1556), 4, 24, 35–41, 103–4, 127, 143, 160, 191n82 Comentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1554), 4, 128 De Censura, sive Excommunicatione Ecclesiastica, rectoque eius usu (1551), 137, 138–9 De non plectendis morte adulteris consultatio (1548), 137–9, 142 Germaniae ad Angliam Gratulatio (1558), 5 Reformatio legum Ecclesiasticarum (1571), 139 Rerum in ecclesia gestarum (1559), 4, 74–5, 128–9 A Sermon of Christ Crucified (1570), 140–42 Foxe, Simeon, 4, 5, 131, 180n6, 181n9 Frankfort, 4, 132–3, 143 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 20 Frith, John, 22, 29, 190n51

Harding, Thomas, 98–9, 121–3, 206n90 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 86, 205n51 Hastings, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, 135 Henry IV, King of England, 45 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, 106–8, 209n11 Henry V, King of England, 45 Henry VIII, King of England, 1, 14, 42, 53, 83, 108 Hildebrand, see Gregory VII, Pope Hooker, Richard, 143 Hookes, Ellis, 164, 173–9 Hooper, John, 164 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 3 Howard, Thomas, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, 3, 4 Howard, Thomas, 4th Duke of Norfolk, 4, 5, 131, 135, 215n8 Huggarde, Miles, 8, 84–6, 95, 124, 161, 205n42 Humphrey, Lawrence, 134–5, 136, 139, 218n62 Hussey, M., 176 Hussites, 20

Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of Winchester, 4, 14, 60, 104, 110–11, 181n11 Gascoyne, Dr, 91, 93 Geneva Bible, 134 Gilby, Anthony, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 215n16, 215–16n23, 218n62 Glover, John, 96 Glover, Robert, 81–2, 96, 164 Goodman, Christopher, 142, 149–50 Gouch, Alexander, 92–3, 172–4, 206n76 Gough, John, 136 Gregory VII, Pope, 105–8, 209n11 Grey, Jane, 2, 165, 167–8, 170 Grindal, Edmund, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, 5, 129, 134, 135–6, 214n2, 215n17, 220n80 Guernsey martyrs, 97–9, 121–4 Guilbert, Guillaume, see Guernsey martyrs

James I, King of England, 178 Jewel, John, Bishop of Salisbury, 98 Jezebel in Revelation, see Revelation, Book of, Jezebel Queen Mary as, 91, 144, 146, 173 Joachim da Fiore, 19–21, 187n6, 187n7, 187n13 John of Olivi, 20 Joye, George, 138 Julius III, Pope, 157

Hales, John, 118–19 Hales, Joyce, 75

Illyricus, Matthius Flacius, see Magdeburg Centuries Isaac, Edward, 133

King’s Book (1543), 1 Knox, John, 4, 132–3, 142, 143–4, 150, 218n49 Kyme, Anne, see Anne Askew Kyme, Thomas, 42, 63, 64, 66–7, 83, 87 Lambert, François, 19, 21, 187n7 Lascelles, John, 42, 43, 52, 54, 59, 61, 84, 193n3, 194n6 Lashford, Joan, see Joanne Warne Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 38, 42, 54, 61, 138, 193n3, 194n6

238 Index Le Riche, Marguerite, 158 Lewes, Joyce, 79, 96, 97, 99 Lewes, Thomas, 96 Leyland, John, 15–16 Liberty of Minories, 136 Lollards, 11, 16, 20, 38, 45, 54, 62, 128, 197n47, 200n87 London, Dr, 124 Lot, 109 Louth, John, 87 Lucretia, 86 Lucy, William, 3, 105 Luther, Martin, 9, 19, 20, 22, 149, 186–7n3 Magdeburg Centuries, 114–15, 116 Mall, Thomas, 164, 182 Marsh, George, 81 Martin, Dr, 169, 176–7 Martyrs, see by name of the primitive church, 45, 47, 50, 72 in Revelation, 69–71 robes, 69–72, 119–20, 159 virgin martyrs, 46, 62, 113–19, 210–1n32 Mary, mother of Christ, 8, 9, 24, 32, 35–6, 39, 46, 68, 72, 86 Mary I, Queen of England, 1, 2, 5, 84, 108, 131, 142–50, 161, 180n2 Mason, Thomas, 164, 174–9 Massey, Perotine, see Guernsey martyrs Merindol, massacre of, 111–13 More, Thomas, 45, 212n65 Mosaic Law, 35, 137–9, 142 New Jerusalem, see Ecclesia Nichol, William, 80 Nicholas II, Pope, 109 Norton, Thomas, 139 Nowell, Alexander, 134, 135, 180–1n7 Oglethorpe, Owen, 104 Oldcastle, John, 45, 47, 49–52, 72, 195n16 Olith, Saint, 66 Oporinus, Joannes (press), 4, 133 Opus Arduum, 19 Ormes, Cicely, 80 Oxford Brasenose College, 3 Magdalen College, 3, 104–5, 134, 180n6 Foxe at, 3

Palmer, Julius, 79, 120 Pantaleon, Heinrich, 129, 130, 214n5 Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 135, 136, 139 Parkhurst, John, Bishop of Norwich, 5, 134, 135 Parkinson, Thomas, 79 Parr, Catherine, Queen of England, 14–15, 43, 83, 162–3, 185–6n47 Parsons, Robert, 82–4, 92–3, 94–5, 97, 170–1, 172, 174, 204n38 Paul, Saint, 63–4, 84 Peerson, Anthony, 119, 120 Pendleton, Dr, 81 Perpetua, Saint, 49 Phillip II, king of Spain, 2, 145 Philpot, John (martyr), 81, 120 Philpot, John, 136 Pilkington, James, Bishop of Durham, 135, 215n16 Pius V, Pope, 140 Polley, Margery, 119 Ponet, John, 142, 149–50, 151, 158–9 Pornapolis, 35–40 Potton, Anne, 119, see also John Foxe, Christus Triumphans Prest, wife of, 15, 79, 80, 100–2, 103, 113, 119, 142, 154–5, 156–7, 158–9, 164 in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 168–9, 170, 171–2, 175, 177–8 Protestant resistance theory, 148–51, 161, 218n62 Prudentius, Aurelius Clemens, 115–16, 117 Puritans (Puritanism), 130–37 Randall, Agnes, see Agnes Foxe Recantation, 54, 58–61, 199n70 Revelation, Book of, 8, 11, 18–34, 178 Antichrist, see Antichrist canonicity of, 186–7n3 Jezebel (Rev. 2), 23, 26–30 martyrs in (Rev. 6–7) 69–71 New Jerusalem (Rev. 21), see Ecclesia virgins in (Rev. 14) 68–9, 70–71 Whore of Babylon (Rev. 17–18), see Whore of Babylon Woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12), 23, 32, 190n69, 190n73 Reynolds, Dr, 154–5 Rich, Richard, 43, 49, 51–2

Index 239 Ridley, Nicholas, Bishop of London, 4, 38, 119–20, 138 Russell, John, Duke of Bedford, 135 St Giles Cripplegate parish church, 136 St Mary Aldermary parish church, 42 Saints Catholic, 46, 65–6, 69 Catholic hagiography, 46, 62, 72, 76, 78, 82, 113–19 see also martyrs Sampson, Thomas, 134, 135 Saunders, Lawrence, 81, 164 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset, 2 Seymour, Jane, Queen of England, 1 Shaxton, Nicholas, Bishop of Salisbury, 42, 43, 58, 194n6 Solomon, 57 Spencer, Dr, 91, 93 Steven, Saint, 54, 55, 84 Steyr, John, 96 Strickland, William, 139 Tomkins, Thomas, 80 Tower of London, 43 Troubleville, Bishop of Exeter (D’Urberville), 100–1, 154, 156–7 Trunchfield, Joan, 119 Turner, William, 136, 215n18 Tyconius, 19–21

Tyndale, William, 22, 44–5, 50 Tyrrell, Edmund, 88–9 Valusianus, Bishop of Carthage, 109–10 Vergil, Polydore, 45 Vestments controversy, 5, 133–7 Wade, Christopher, 119 Warne, Joanne, 119 Wedding garments, see martyrs, robes Wentworth, Anne, 159 White, Rawlins, 119 Whitehead, David, 42 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 166 Whittingham, William, 132–3, 134, 135, 137 Whore of Babylon, 23, 26–32, 33, 103, 124, 127 see also Pornapolis Wisdom, Robert, 58, 60–61, 194n6, 199n68 Wriothesley, Thomas, Lord Chancellor, 14, 43, 49, 51–2, 53 Wycliffe, John, 11, 20, 45, 51, 128 Young, Elizabeth, 15, 89–91, 92, 93, 100, 101, 163 in abridgements of the Acts and Monuments, 169, 170, 175–7

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